AACN, Jonas Center, & Khan Academy to Produce New Learning Resources

Jonas Center, Khan Academy, and AACN Announce Plans to Produce 
Expanded Healthcare Learning Resources for a Global Audience

NEW YORK, December 4, 2014 – The Jonas Center for Nursing and Veterans Healthcare (Jonas Center), Khan Academy, and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) today announced the continuation of a groundbreaking partnership to produce innovative, online healthcare content for a global audience of faculty, students, practitioners, and consumers. Building on the success of the partnership’s inaugural year, plans are underway to develop an expansive catalog of healthcare videos that can be used by nursing students preparing to sit for the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN®), as well as others interested in learning more about body systems and a variety of common health concerns.

“Working closely with our partners, the Jonas Center is committed to serving as a catalyst for sparking innovative approaches to nursing education,” said Darlene Curley, Executive Director of the Jonas Center. “We are energized by the wealth of learning resources that have already resulted from this productive collaboration and are looking forward to adding more world-class content to the web in the coming year.”

In the coming year, videos and practice exam questions will be produced touching on diseases across major body systems, including the circulatory, endocrine, gastrointestinal, hematologic, immune, lymphatic, muscular, renal, respiratory, and skeletal systems. This expanded content was made possible by a $560,000 grant from the Jonas Center. New videos and questions will be posted on the Khan Academy website as they are produced.  

“In keeping with our mission of providing free educational resources to a global audience, we are delighted to build on a growing body of interprofessional tools housed on Khan Academy’s website through our work with our nursing partners,” said Dr. Rishi Desai, Program Lead for Medical Partnerships at Khan Academy. “The videos produced from this collaboration receive more than 12,000 views each day and are consistently receiving positive reviews from learners.”

Formed in September 2013, the collaboration among the Jonas Center, Khan Academy, and AACN emerged out of a mutual desire to produce free educational resources for a new generation of more visual, technology-savvy learners. To achieve this goal, an international competition was launched to identify content creators with expertise in using online tools to teach NCLEX-RN content areas, focusing on cardiovascular, respiratory, and hematology systems. Fourteen individuals were selected following the competition, including representatives from the disciplines of nursing, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, public health, and graduate studies in biological science. 

With guidance provided by experts at Khan Academy and a panel of AACN faculty reviewers, the winning content creators have since developed more than 200 educational video, several informative articles, and more than 300 practice exam questions that are now accessible for free at www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/NCLEX-RN.

“Re-envisioning how best to provide healthcare content to today’s student is a challenge facing all nurse educators,” said Dr. Eileen T. Breslin, President of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. “We are delighted to partner with the Jonas Center and Khan Academy in this work that is pushing the envelope on traditional approaches to nursing education and exploring how best to use technology to generate strong interest and enthusiasm for learning.”

To receive regular updates when new videos are released, please log onto Khan Academy website at www.khanacademy.org.

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About the Jonas Center for Nursing and Veterans Healthcare
The Jonas Center for Nursing and Veterans Healthcare, established in 2006 by Barbara and Donald Jonas, is dedicated to improving healthcare by advancing nursing scholarship, leadership and innovation. Its two main programs are the Jonas Nurse Leaders Scholar Program, which aims to address the dire shortage of nursing faculty by preparing nurses with doctoral degrees to step into this critical role, and the Jonas Veterans Healthcare Program, which seeks to improve the health of veterans by supporting doctoral-level nursing candidates committed to advancing veterans’ healthcare. These programs have supported 600 doctoral scholars nationwide, and graduated 100 nurse leaders. The Jonas Center’s goal is to support 1,000 Scholars by 2016.

About Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a 501(c)3 non-profit with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy provides free online educational experiences (e.g., adaptive exercises, instructional videos, a computer programming platform, dashboard analytics, teacher tools) that support personalized education for users of all ages in a scalable way. To date, the organization has delivered over 440 million lessons and over 2 billion exercise problems. Currently it has over 15 million registered users and over 4 million exercise problems completed each day. In addition to content from prestigious institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MIT and NASA, Khan Academy covers subject areas such as computer science, math, art history, economics, physics, biology, chemistry and more.