NURS 8546 Week 9 Rollout Timeline Example Example

Four Terms, Three Gates and One Stopping Rule: A Rollout Timeline for the Flipped Skills Course, Starting With a Single Section

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8546: Strategies for Innovation in Nursing Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Four Terms, Three Gates and One Stopping Rule: A Rollout Timeline for the Flipped Skills Course, Starting With a Single Section

Why One Section, Not a Pilot Cohort

The flipped skills course will be rolled out over four terms. The first stage is a single section, not a pilot cohort of several sections. A single section can be taught by the two faculty who designed the materials, so that the first term tests the design rather than the preparation of colleagues who have not yet used it. If the design fails in their hands, there is no reason to train nine more people to deliver it.

Implementation research distinguishes between stages of putting a program in place, from initial implementation to full operation, and warns that programs often fail when they move to full scale before early problems are solved (Fixsen et al., 2005). The timeline is built so that each stage can be stopped before the next begins.

Stages

Each stage carries a time range expressed in academic terms, an owner named by role and entry conditions that must hold before it starts.

Stage 1: One section (fall, term 1). Owner: course coordinator. The two early adopters teach one of the eight laboratory sections with the full flipped design. Entry conditions: all twelve recorded demonstrations and pre-laboratory quizzes are complete; the procedure for unprepared learners is written; the evaluation measures are in place.

Stage 2: Half the sections, full-time faculty only (spring, term 2). Owner: course coordinator. Four sections move, taught by the five full-time faculty. Entry conditions: gate 1 passed; all five full-time faculty have completed preparation and passed the readiness check.

Stage 3: All sections, including adjunct-taught (fall, term 3). Owner: associate dean, because this stage requires budget. All eight sections move, including the four taught by adjuncts. This is the expensive stage: it requires paid preparation for six adjuncts, additional laboratory practice stations and the purchase of a second set of skills check equipment. Entry conditions: gate 2 passed; adjunct preparation funding confirmed; equipment delivered.

Stage 4: Consolidation (spring, term 4). Owner: course coordinator. The course runs in its flipped form without additional support, and responsibility for maintaining the recordings and quizzes moves into the coordinator's ongoing role. Entry condition: gate 3 passed.

Gates

Between stages sit gates, each a question with a numerical answer, so that passing a gate is a finding rather than a decision made by whoever is in the room.

Gate 1 (end of term 1): In the flipped section, is the first-attempt pass rate on the course's three skills checks within 5 percentage points of the mean for the other seven sections, or higher? And did at least 70% of learners complete the pre-laboratory quiz before each session?

Gate 2 (end of term 2): In the four sections taught by full-time faculty other than the designers, is the first-attempt pass rate within 5 points of the designers' section from term 1? This gate tests whether the design transfers to other teachers. It is the gate most likely to fail, because the design has so far been delivered only by the people who built it.

Gate 3 (end of term 3): Across all eight sections, is the first-attempt pass rate at or above the pre-change baseline of 71%, and is the gap between adjunct-taught and full-time-taught sections less than 8 points?

Stage 3, the expensive stage, is placed deliberately after gate 2. If the design does not transfer to other full-time faculty, the program will learn that before spending money on adjunct preparation and equipment.

Each gate has a named person responsible for compiling the data and a date by which it must be presented: the course coordinator presents gate results at the first faculty meeting after grades are posted, so that the next stage's entry conditions can be checked before term begins. If the data are not ready by that meeting, the next stage does not start, even if everyone expects it to pass. A gate passed late is treated as a gate not yet passed. The gates also have limits. Section-level pass rates rest on about 25 learners each, so a difference of 5 points can arise from two or three learners. The gates are therefore set at sizes that would matter to the program, not at sizes that prove an effect, and the outcome evaluation that runs alongside the rollout is where the effect is tested properly.

Dependencies

Five dependencies could delay the timeline. Recording and quiz completion before term 1. Room scheduling that allows practice stations in all laboratory rooms by term 3. Budget approval for adjunct preparation and equipment before the end of term 2. Continued employment of the two designers through term 2, since they carry the design until it transfers. And access to section-level skills check data, which the registrar does not currently report and the coordinator will have to compile by hand. Hall and Hord (2015) note that changes in schools often stall on logistics of exactly this kind rather than on the merit of the innovation.

Stopping Condition

The rollout will be stopped, not adjusted, if either of two results occurs. First, if the first-attempt pass rate in flipped sections is more than 10 percentage points below the non-flipped sections in two consecutive terms. Second, if fewer than 60% of learners complete pre-laboratory work in any term after term 1 despite the procedures in place, which would mean the design depends on preparation learners cannot give. In either case, all sections return to the previous design the following term, and the course coordinator reports the results to the faculty with an analysis of what failed. Writing the condition before the rollout begins prevents it from being redefined once the program has invested in the change, a risk that grows with each stage completed (Rogers, 2003).

Stopping is not treated as failure of the people involved. If the rollout stops, the recorded demonstrations remain available to all learners as an optional resource, and the program keeps what it learned about laboratory sessions that begin with practice. The report to faculty will say which stage stopped the rollout and what that stage revealed, so the next change the program attempts can begin from that knowledge rather than from the same assumptions.

References

Fixsen, D. L., Naoom, S. F., Blase, K. A., Friedman, R. M., & Wallace, F. (2005). Implementation research: A synthesis of the literature. University of South Florida, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, The National Implementation Research Network.

Hall, G. E., & Hord, S. M. (2015). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Pearson.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.