Appendix B-8.
Tara Serwetnyk: Transforming Nursing Education Using Technology
Author – Place (Year)
Background information
Dr. Tara Serwetnyk is an Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Education at the University of Rochester School of Nursing. In her role as director, she oversees instructional designers, integration of learning resources, educational technologies and innovations, Quality Matters certifications, curricular assessment, course and program alignment, and accreditation processes. Additionally, she has responsibilities for the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE)-driven assessment and evaluation of all programs. She also leads the Redefining Our Classroom (iROC) initiative and the school’s iPad program, which has helped the University of Rochester School of Nursing earn Apple’s distinguished school designation and national recognition for educational innovations.
Dr. Serwetnyk is a three-time graduate of the University of Rochester. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing (magna cum laude), a master’s in Leadership and Healthcare Systems with a focus on Health Promotion, Education, and Technology, and then her EdD in Education and Administration with a specialization in higher education. Early on in her career, she worked for the University of Rochester Medical Center, where she was engaged in many roles, including as a registered nurse in pediatrics, a pediatric burn coordinator, an assistant nurse manager, a clinical nurse specialist (CNS), and a senior nurse educator and training center coordinator, where she led research and implementation for the Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) program across disciplines. Her success with innovation implementations and interprofessional initiatives in the hospital led to her recruitment to the School of Nursing in 2018, specifically to lead the Redefining Our Classroom (iROC) initiative and to help transition the undergraduate curriculum toward a more competency-based, student-centered model. She has received recognition for educational innovation and leadership, including the Klainer Entrepreneurship Award in 2019 and 2023, the University of Rochester School of Nursing (URSON) Outstanding Faculty Colleague Award in 2021 and 2022, and is a co-author of the school’s 2023 American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award.
Overall, Dr. Serwetnyk has consistently acted as an entrepreneurial educator through identifying gaps in traditional academic structures and designing practice-based solutions that enrich the experiences for learners, faculty, and the institution. More specifically, her leadership on the Redefining Our Classroom (iROC) initiative illustrates how an educator can use technology as a catalyst to redesign pedagogy, assessment, and organizational culture rather than simply “add devices to an existing course (T.Serwetnyk, interview, March 3, 2026)”. In the following sections, some of Dr. Serwetnyk’s innovations will be highlighted with their value added. Then, her story about the iROC innovation will be reconstructed through an entrepreneurial lens, reporting on how she recognized an opportunity, mobilized resources, and built a sustainable innovation in nursing education.
Key innovations and their value added
Dr. Serwetnyk has been a part of and/or led multiple key innovations during her professional journey at the University of Rochester Medical Center and the University of Rochester School of Nursing. Some of these innovations include the Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) Program, the Redefining Our Classroom (iROC) and iPad program, and implementing an instructional design model through the creation of the Education Innovations Team (EdIT), which has since evolved into the Center of Excellence in Education for the School of Nursing.
Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) Program. During Dr. Serwetnyk’s tenure as a senior nurse educator and training center coordinator at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Strong Memorial Hospital, she helped design and implement the American Heart Association’s RQI model. This innovation replaced the biennial Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) classes with a more frequent, data-driven, mannequin-based application-based practice. She secured engagement from key disciplines, including nursing, technicians, respiratory therapy, emergency medicine providers, medical students, and critical care leadership, and served on the AHA RQI board to provide feedback. The interprofessional resuscitation education model that she developed was truly rare and positioned the University of Rochester Medical Center as a pilot site and partner for the AHA. This influenced national RQI design, including community-focused, hands-only CPR resources. This initiative added significant value to the institution by maintaining CPR competence among medical personnel at regular quarterly intervals rather than once every two years. This innovation demonstrated a measurable impact on patient outcomes, including a widely publicized case in which a surgical technologist applied their RQI-honed skills to save a teenager struck by lightning. It was the muscle memory from the mandatory quarterly CPR training that was cited as a key factor in the surgical technologists’ ability to perform CPR effectively in the moment of crisis.
iROC and iPad Program. Another innovation that Dr. Serwetnyk led is called Redefining Our Classroom (iROC) and included the implementation of an iPad program. In 2018, she was recruited by the University of Rochester School of Nursing to lead this initiative. She spearheaded the integration of iPads first in the RN-BS program and then in the Accelerated Baccalaureate in Nursing (ABSN) program. Through this initiative, she leveraged technology as a driving force to transition traditional classroom learning to competency-based, student-centered, active learning. This shift moved many classes away from the traditional 3-hour lecture format toward interactive, scenario-based learning activities. This increased student engagement and their ability to think critically and use clinical judgment. This innovation helped maintain National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) pass rates for their ABSN program, which have consistently remained above 90%.
Instructional Design Model. After starting full-time at the University of Rochester School of Nursing in 2018 and leading the iROC initiative, Dr. Serwetnyk was able to integrate an instructional design model where faculty collaborate with assigned instructional designers to co-plan courses, manage educational technologies, and help design and implement active, outcomes-aligned learning activities using iPads and other tools. Creating this partnership between faculty and instructional designers reduced faculty anxiety with technology utilization and integration. To aid this initiative, she designed faculty workshops that modeled the pedagogy being promoted, helping faculty experience the benefits of student-centered methods from a participant’s perspective. This increased the faculty buy-in and their willingness to partner with instructional designers and experiment with new technologies. This fostered a peer culture in which faculty could share their “small wins,” which spurred further innovation. This accelerated the adoption of evidence-based teaching strategies into the classrooms of the RN-BS and ABSN programs. Furthermore, a clear correlation between embedded instructional design and higher-level technology integration was observed, with improved student outcomes using the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) model (Bandura, 1977).
Center for Excellence in Nursing and Health Sciences Education. Another key innovation by Dr. Serwetnyk is the growth of the instructional design model into the Center for Excellence in Nursing and Health Sciences Education. It began as a very small team of instructional designers collaborating with faculty. With positive feedback and strong collaboration, the team grew and evolved into the Education Innovations Team, or EdIT for short. Her vision continued to grow through the Education Innovations Team to the point where she had a team of approximately 14 members, and they became the Center for Excellence in Education. The work conducted through the center includes oversight of instructional design and integration of academic innovations, education research and evaluation, assessments, alignment, and accreditation, all under one umbrella. This institutionalized innovation and educational scholarship, which is supported by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), has helped position the school of nursing for external honors such as the Apple Distinguished School, which was just redesignated, the National League for Nursing (NLN) Center of Excellence, and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award.
In-depth story of an innovation: The iROC and iPad Program.
How the idea came about and was evaluated/refined
When Dr. Tara Serwetnyk transitioned from the hospital to the School of Nursing in 2018, she was made aware of a misalignment between how students were being taught and the kind of thinking required to transition into practice. She sat in three-hour lectures where “the instructor was standing in the front of the room and just talking at the students,” while many students were on “Facebook and Amazon shopping,” or rolling their eyes when asked to work through a scenario and saying “now I get to teach myself, great.”
As a hands-on educator who had always used scenario-based, problem-solving approaches in the hospital, this was “a little discouraging” because “there’s so much thinking that has to go into caring for other people and the decisions that nurses have to make.” As a result of these observations, Dr. Serwetnyk noticed a clear mismatch between the competencies required in practice and the learning experiences students were actually having. The value proposition she began to articulate was not “put iPads in students’ hands,” but rather “use a common digital platform to create more authentic, practice-based learning experiences that cultivate clinical judgment and readiness to transition into clinical practice to deliver safe and competent patient care.”
At the same time as Dr. Serwetnyk was witnessing the classroom experience of the students and faculty, the school was already considering an “iPad program” for undergraduates, and she was recruited “to help them implement a program called iROC.” It was originally framed as implementing iPads in the RN to BS program. Quickly, she reframed the concept of the iROC initiative: “it was bigger than that. It wasn’t just the technology, the technology was really just the facilitator for transitioning to a more competency-based approach to education, and one where it’s more student-centered and less faculty-centered.”
The core “idea” of this innovation, then, was to use a common technology platform, Apple iPad, as a lever to move the school from passive, lecture-based instruction to more active, student-centered, engaging, competency-based learning that would better prepare students to transition into practice as graduate nurses.
Several drivers convinced Dr. Serwetnyk and the leadership at the school of nursing that this initiative was not only worthwhile but necessary. She notes that “all the literature was trending in a direction where our graduates were not safe and confident in care. So, patient outcomes were at risk.” The NCSBN was also rebranding the NCLEX into the NextGen exam because “We had nurses, or graduates, passing the NCLEX exam and still being at high risk for patient errors…failure to rescue, medication errors, patient safety.”
The new exam emphasized clinical judgment and critical thinking, assessing whether graduates could “make appropriate decisions and act appropriately” based on patient information. Internally, her colleagues and she saw clear signs that the status quo was not working. Students were disengaged in long lectures, focused mainly on “what was on the test,” and often struggled to transfer classroom knowledge to clinical settings, which was contributing to a “large gap where students couldn’t take what they were learning in the classroom and apply it in the clinical setting.”
These external and internal factors ignited a strong passion that they “had to shift” to a competency-based approach and that aligning teaching with Next Gen NCLEX made the initiative worth pursuing. Early outcome data later reinforced this decision to not miss the boat and push this innovation forward: national NCLEX pass rates had fallen into the “60-something percent,” while the University of Rochester School of Nursing’s retained “consistency over 90%,” and students and alumni reported that the iPad-enabled active learning “benefited them” in practice.
In entrepreneurial terms, Dr. Serwetnyk and her colleagues were weighing the risks of disrupting entrenched teaching practices against the potential “return” of better-prepared graduates and improved patient outcomes. The external pressure of the NextGen NCLEX and the internal evidence of disengaged learners reduced the perceived risk of change; maintaining the status quo seemed more dangerous than experimenting with a competency-based, technology-enabled model. Initial NCLEX data alongside student reflections served as feedback that this innovation was paying off.
Planning and gathering the necessary resources
Planning for the iROC and the iPad initiative involved assembling a broad, cross-functional task force and clarifying mission and goals. Financial and human resources were carefully planned by senior leadership, including Dean Kathy Rideout and Dr. Lydia Rotondo, both visionaries and advocates for this program and the position. It was said that Dr. Rotondo “drank the Kool-Aid” after watching a presentation from Apple and being presented with evidence from the Macy Foundation and Educause on the importance of digital technology in 21st-century health professions education. Unfortunately, the grant intended to fund Dr. Serwetnyk’s position for this role was not obtained. However, Dean Kathy Rideout and Dr. Lydia Rotondo’s vision, advocacy, and support for the program and position ultimately led to their decision to hire her, despite the position not being funded by an external source. This demonstrates strong leadership commitment to this innovation.
When she arrived, “there was a task force that I joined, and I think that task force is really what helped to make this successful, because we had buy-in really from the top down…IT, faculty, faculty leads…administrative support…financial support…the associate dean…program directors for the RN to BS program and our ABSN program.”
Together, they created “a mission and vision statement along with goals,” organized around three pillars:
(1) “Increase faculty development…not just around the iPad, but best practices in teaching and learning,”
(2) focus on “the pedagogy, or andragogy, so how we’re actually teaching,” including alignment of learning activities with outcomes, and
(3) “access and diversity in the digital landscape,” ensuring all students had equal access to the same device and could adapt to an evolving technological environment.
While students were the most visible “customers” of the iROC innovation, Dr. Serwetnyk consistently framed the work as creating value for multiple stakeholder groups: students who needed equitable access to devices and more engaging learning, faculty who needed support to teach differently without losing their identity as content experts, and institutional leaders who needed evidence of quality and innovation for accreditation and reputation purposes. Designing with all three of these groups in mind influenced decisions about the scope of the pilot, the composition of the task force, and the kinds of outcome data they prioritized.
As part of this innovation, given financial constraints without the grant, the team had to “consider the cost of the iPad itself” and decide whether the school or students would pay for the device. The decision to proceed without the anticipated grant funding highlights Dr. Serwetnyk’s entrepreneurial mindset around resource utilization.
Instead of seeing the failed acquisition of the grant as a signal to abandon the idea, she and her leaders re-framed existing resources, reallocated internal funds, redesigned roles, and initiated a phased implementation. This allowed for a smaller-scale implementation to evaluate the value of the innovation and room for development, as evidence was obtained that validated the effectiveness of the innovation.
In the pilot, “we paid for them for the students,” and only later passed the cost of the iPAd to students once the program was “more established” and clearly in students’ “best interest.” A crucial resource decision was embedding instructional designers. They would “work with faculty ahead of time to help plan out what these activities are going to look like, and then…be in the classroom to support them,” allowing faculty to remain content experts while the instructional designers handled technology and alignment. Finally, they began with the RN to BS program which was a hybrid model with on-site and online components as the first implementation site before expanding into the ABSN program.
Implementation and monitoring of the initiative
Implementation began with a cultural and technical shift. Dr. Serwetnyk started by observing current practices, such as long lectures and disengaged students, and then designed faculty development that modeled the active learning they wanted students to experience. When teaching faculty to use the iPads, they were not simply shown features; instead, faculty “read an article, or a video, or do something related to best practices in teaching and learning, and then we would role-play…create, like, a mind map together, or answer questions together, or do some sort of collaborative work…to demonstrate how they would shift their teaching practices like that in the classroom.”
Embedded instructional designers were in the classroom during early implementations, so faculty “could be, really, the content experts and then…the instructional designers could help them with the technology pieces so that they kind of had that sense of security. If anything went wrong, someone was right there to help them.” They were intentional about starting small – sometimes with “one class that they changed the module on, or…one activity that they did in the classroom,” and then asking faculty to share the successes so that “hearing their successes made other faculty more likely to try something new.”
It is evident that Dr. Serwetnyk intentionally framed these early implementations as small and safe instead of a high-stakes rollout. This aligns with entrepreneur approaches that prioritize small tests, rapid learning, and adaptation. Through her encouragement of faculty to pilot a single activity, reflect on what happened, and publicly share their “small wins,” she reduced the perceived cost of trying something new and created a rich feedback-based environment where ideas could be refined before being scaled.
Monitoring and iteration were ongoing. They used the SAMR model to track how deeply technology was being integrated, noting a “direct correlation with embedded instructional design support, and advancement of the SAMR model to really redefining how we’re teaching,” where students engaged in learning activities “that would have been impossible before that technology was available.”
They also tracked outcomes such as NCLEX pass rates (“we are consistently over 90%”) and gathered feedback from students and alumni about how the iPad-enabled learning environment helped them develop clinical judgment and apply learning in practice. When activities or contexts did not work as expected (for example, trying small group work with 90 students in the auditorium) they adopted a “failing forward” mindset: “instead of just scrapping it altogether,” they asked, “what went well, and how can we make it better?” and adjusted logistics, such as reserving extra rooms and reconfiguring space.
This “failing forward” mindset is consistent with an entrepreneurial approach. Instead of interpreting results that were less than perfect as evidence that the innovation was flawed, Dr. Serwetnyk treated them as data points about context and logistics and areas for further development and growth. By asking, “what went well, and how can we make it better?” she modeled for faculty how to decouple the value of the underlying idea from the particulars of a first attempt, which is essential for sustaining innovation beyond a single champion or pilot.
Ensuring sustainability and growth if appropriate
Sustainability and growth emerged through alignment with external standards, visible outcomes, and deliberate institutionalization. Within “less than 5 years,” Dr. Serwetnyk notes that they “really made a big transition to a more competency-based approach to teaching and learning,” and this was reinforced by the need to align with the Next Gen CNELX and AACN expectations around competency and informatics. The consistently high NCLEX pass rates (above 90%) and student and alumni testimony that the way they learned “benefited them” created a strong case for maintaining the innovation.
These successes justified additional resources and organizational changes. Over time, “the success… allowed us as a team to get more resources,” and “we’ve proven that having an embedded instructional designer is beneficial,” leading to a growth from two or three people to a team of 13 or 14, and to the evolution into a formal Center of Excellence in Education which integrates innovation, instructional design, outcomes assessments, research, and accreditation work.
Strategically, Dr. Serwetnyk worked to embed the iROC principles into the school’s systems to ensure sustainability. Aligning instructional design, academic innovation, and assessment within a single Center of Excellence created a structural home base for ongoing experimentation of educational technologies, faculty development, and scholarship. She ensured the initiative was aligned with CCNE expectations and collaboratively pursuing recognitions such as the Apple Distinguished School, NLN Center of Excellence, and the AACN Innovation awards to anchor the work she did in external standards. This would ultimately add complexity for future leadership to revert to purely lecture-based models without clear justification.
Physical and programmatic infrastructures were also redesigned for long-term impact. Lessons from the auditorium experience informed new construction where “everything was mobile…chairs were mobile…tables…able to move into small groups,” and large classrooms and experiential learning rooms were set up so students were always in groups rather than rows. The approach has now extended beyond the original undergraduate programs and into on-campus clinicals, simulation, the maters in nursing education, informatics, and online/distance learning, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where “the resources have grown because the school has seen the successes, and then we’ve justified the need for more based on the…collaborative work that we’re doing.”
Observations and lessons learned
Interviewing Dr. Serwetnyk and listening to her share her innovations, especially the iRoc initiative, while comparing them to concepts learned in the course, has shifted how I think about innovation in my own practice as an educator and the process by which it can yield a more sustainable innovation. It was evident that she conducted the necessary needs and gap assessment before moving forward with any innovation. She was deliberate in framing the technology project as a conduit for integrating pedagogical, cultural, and structural changes. Additionally, she consistently returned to the desired outcomes for graduates of the programs. Was the innovation adding value to the programs and changing outcomes for the better? The specific example of the iROC initiative she shared reminds me to be more intentional when identifying misalignments in my own teaching, ensure I clarify the value of any new idea, evaluate the implications of ‘missing the boat’ versus ‘sinking the boat’, and ensure that any innovation is designed on a small scale for a pilot-like trial, learning, growing, and remembering to fail forward. As I continue to grow in my academic and instructional design roles, I plan to adopt her approach of pairing a vision with careful stakeholder engagement, long-term sustainability planning, ensuring alignment with the institution’s vision and strategic plan, and ensuring that future iterations are data-informed.
