PhD and DNP programs not traditionally online, are they now online?

[SummerGarden, BSN, MSN, RN]

Due to many of the adjustments made to educational offerings because of COVID-19 by many institutions, is your university or college making permanent changes to the delivery of doctoral (PhD in nursing or DNP) curriculum? Prior to mandated state shelter-in-place orders many competitive traditional programs had little to no online components to their educational offerings. This meant that if you were an aspiring doctoral student not living at home with your parents or you were not independently wealthy and located in the geographic location of those universities, you could never consider attending that university to further your education. Now, some of those universities have moved 100% online in order to facilitate further learning for their current students.

Recently, I met a professor of a traditional non-doctoral program who stated that his university is reviewing live online courses as a permanent solution because they simulate much of the value provided by traditional in-person course offerings. Therefore, I am just curious if your university is thinking and choosing to do the same with their doctoral program? By the way, this is actually a question for faculty, but those who are students and know the answer, please chime-in! ?

[TiffyRN, BSN, PhD]

While I'm not sure my program is classified as "competitive", it is a based out of traditional brick and mortar State university. The PhD program is largely online. I was required to go to a campus week approximately once a year for in-person interactions with our professors and others students. While I had already defended a few months prior to the stay-at-home orders, they don't seem to have affected the PhD students that much. There was a halt to research requiring in-person contact but otherwise things just kind of continued as usual. The earlier courses were administered by Blackboard with a lot of email support. As one progressed and started working more with a dissertation advisor, there was a lot of more personal email and phone calls. One other in-person requirement was that one's final defense had to be in-person on campus but that changed at the height of the stay-home orders. For that period of time, students defended remotely using Skype for Business with all their committee members remotely attending.

Also, in my small PhD cohort, 3 of us were in the same general geographic location, but that was about 6 hours drive from campus. A couple of other students lived 3-4 hours from campus, and a couple more lived in the general metropolitan area as the university.