This Level 4 Open Education Mini-Grant supported the redesign of three RN-to-BSN nursing courses: NRS 3400 (Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice), NRS 3600 (Nursing Leadership & Management), and NRS 4800 (Professional Concepts in Nursing) through the integration of transitioning to only open educational resources and using components of open pedagogy. The project replaced three required commercial textbooks with openly licensed resources and student-driven, cohort & public facing assignments such as peer-reviewed research briefs and leadership toolkits, engaging students as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive consumers of content. Because RN-to-BSN students are already licensed, practicing nurses, this model was designed to honor their clinical expertise while strengthening research literacy, leadership capacity, and professional identity, in alignment with the AACN Essentials (2026; 2021) and ACEN accreditation standards.
Across the three redesigned courses, students moved from consuming a purchased textbook to producing work grounded in their own clinical practice. In NRS 3400, 32 students completed original research briefs and presented them in a course symposium. In NRS 3600, students built leadership toolkits incrementally across the semester, each culminating in a complete toolkit by the end of the course. Delivered through individual and group work, these open-pedagogy assignments engaged students as co-creators of course content rather than consumers of a fixed text. Instructors observed a clear increase in classroom engagement, higher assignment quality, and stronger alignment between course content and students' direct application of it in their own clinical practice.
For the nursing team, the redesign deepened a shift toward learner-centered, evidence-based instruction and built durable expertise in open pedagogy and OER curation. At the institutional level, the project advanced Iowa State’s goals of affordability and student-centered learning by eliminating required textbook costs in three courses (an estimated savings of $300–$750 per student across the sequence) and by producing course shells that can be reused and adapted across the nursing program and beyond.
This project also established a replicable model supporting the RN-to-BSN program’s broader transition toward a fully open curriculum. With the support of this grant, by the end of academic year 2025–26 all RN-to-BSN courses at Iowa State University use open educational resources with a strong emphasis on open pedagogy, and this momentum has carried into other program development as well, including the MSN curriculum that began development in Summer 2026 and the Accelerated BSN (A-BSN) curriculum launched in Fall 2026.