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Distance Education - Bioethics
Center for Online Bioethics Education
Thanks to the hard work and support of AJCU President Fr. Charles Currie and AJCU Federal Relations Director Cyndy Littlefield, JesuitNET has been awarded two $248,000 Congressional grants for the development and support of a new Center for Online Bioethics Education. The new Center will work with the outstanding bioethics centers and faculty at many Jesuit campuses to facilitate and help meet some underserved educational and training needs. Grounded in a 460-year ethics-centered academic tradition, Jesuit bioethics education is characterized by two core values--respect for the dignity of the person, and justice in the allocation, administration and delivery of health-care services.
The Center for Online Bioethics Education will directly collaborate with and draw upon the resources of major bioethics and health centers at Jesuit medical, nursing, health, law, and graduate schools. These bioethics and health centers will provide the Center's programs and students with an unparalleled reservoir of faculty expertise, academic resources and research opportunities. Among the online offerings that may be developed and offered are the following:
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Noncredit courses and workshops for health care practitioners throughout the Nation
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Graduate courses for existing and new AJCU degree and certificate programs
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Undergraduate courses as electives for students at AJCU colleges and universities
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Special courses and offerings for Jesuit university alumni
Bioethics is a burgeoning field, its growth fueled by the need for information, analysis and consultation among policy makers, health-care professionals, and health-care institutions. Ethical issues related to scientific research and health care have gained much attention in recent years. On the clinical level, every health-care institution has need of staff trained in clinical ethics in order to operate a quality ethics committee and provide case consultation to clinicians. These needs, in turn, generate significant demand for bioethics education, especially when it is accessible to health-care professionals who cannot leave their place of work for extended periods of time.
In part, the Center will be a continuation of work begun in 2001 with the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy and the Center for Ethics and Social Justice, both at Loyola University Chicago. As part of a U.S. Department of Education Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships (LAAP) grant, JesuitNET and Loyola bioethics faculty developed two online bioethics courses as part of a new online Master of Arts degree in Bioethics. These two Loyola courses helped to create and validate the innovative Competency Assessment in Distributed Education (CADE) course design approach that has since been used by over 200 professors at 27 AJCU institutions. CADE will be at the core of the new Center's future online bioethics course development.
During its first year, the Center has been working with bioethics programs at Creighton, Fairfield, Fordham, Georgetown, Loyola Marymount, Loyola Chicago, Regis, Saint Louis, Santa Clara, and Wheeling Jesuit to identify priorities for the development of new online courses. Using a new AJCUBIOETH listserv, the program directors identified and discussed descriptions of 52 current on-campus and online bioethics courses. The courses were grouped into generic headings (e.g., Principles of Bioethics, Law and Bioethics) as a first step towards identifying content commonalities across the campuses.
The planned Center-supported collaborative activity will encourage on-campus bioethics programs to enroll their students in relevant online courses at other AJCU schools rather than to develop redundant on-campus courses. These schools would forgo the need to hire some specialized faculty and the problems associated with either canceling or offering low-enrollment courses. Conversely, they would benefit by promoting their enriched and more flexible course offerings.
This collaboration will support the joint development of certain specialized online courses that might have very low enrollments if offered within only one program. Each participating program might agree to host and teach one course based upon their faculty expertise (enrolling their own and other programs' students), thereby making for an equitable tuition balance of trade among the schools. These shared courses might constitute 2-3 of the 10 required courses for a bioethics master's degree. Each program would continue to offer its own remaining courses for its own degrees.
A Final Report describes the Center's work completed under the first Congressional Grant.
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