Course Titles and Descriptions

All courses and content are available to participants for 90 days following end of course.

Course 1: Laying the Groundwork for the Nexus

This course is intended to provide a foundational understanding of the concept of a Nexus academic-community partnership to introduce practical tools to help your Nexus teams understand the alignment of education and practice using a framework to focus on learning, health, and system outcomes, as well as provide foundational support for how a Nexus team can work together to create a successful Nexus partnership. 

Course 2: Understanding and Making the Most of Your Critical Events of IPE

Nexus teams encounter hurdles every day that can derail plans and progress. This course is designed to help you learn about the concept of critical events and to prepare your team to use the National Center online tool for documenting events related to your program.  The Critical Events of IPE tool is intended to help teams recognize, appreciate, and document your “forks in the road” events and their impact as turning points in your program. How you navigate these powerful mitigating circumstances can advance, delay, or derail the progress of your programs. This team-building activity creates a timestamp of events and provides an opportunity to step back and reflect on the trajectory of how challenges were addressed and opportunities were leveraged. Explaining the cumulative impact of these events can be helpful to communicate with grantmakers, garner resources, and engage with stakeholders.

Course 3: Building a Solid Foundation: Bringing Practice and Education Together Into A Nexus Team

This course is intended for your Nexus team to build a strong foundation by defining its unique assets and understanding how it contrasts with traditional academic-community/practice collaborations. With this course, teams will be able to initiate discussions among stakeholders to assess and extend your collaboration by focusing and articulating your shared goals and interests and build a true Nexus partnership.

Course 4: Creating and Communicating a Compelling Vision

Critical to focusing on individuals, families, caregivers in their communities is a clear, compelling vision and rationale for Nexus partnerships. This course supports Nexus team in scanning their environment and documenting the current situation while aspiring to their highest possible future for the partnership. Teams create a clear, compelling vision and elevator speeches to inspire stakeholders and decide which opportunities fit while ruling-out those that do not.

Course 5: Shared Understanding for Vitality and Sustainability

This course present concepts intended to develop teams that cross educational programs and community settings to think strategically about their environment considering local and national circumstances. It is designed to help set the stage for decision-making and prompts collaborative future thinking about implementing your Nexus program by aligning with existing resources, identifying potential stakeholders, developing a stakeholder communication plan, developing a plan for measurement and data collection of learning, health, and system outcomes, and thinking broadly about sustainability considering aspects beyond traditional financial factors.

Course 6: Community as Curriculum: Designing a Learning Journey for Shared Outcomes

This course is intended to introduce Nexus teams to how to create intentionally designed interprofessional learning environments in “zip codes”, or specific community-based and clinical practice settings, to achieve health and learning outcomes. Enabling stakeholders (professionals, workers, individuals, families, caregivers, students and faculty members) to learn together, these learning environments are built on qualities of teamwork: shared goals, clear roles, mutual trust, effective communication, measurable processes and outcomes, and organizational support. The course is designed to using case studies to introduce Nexus teams to design principles of interprofessional community/clinical learning environments.