Learning through collaboration: the NEXus consortium as a winning collaborative.

The Nursing Education Exchange (NEXus) is a consortium of academic doctoral programs in nursing, initiated in response to a national shortage of well-qualified nurse educators and the need to increase the number of doctoral faculty in nursing programs across the United States. The vision for the consortium was to use distance-accessible delivery methods to provide rural nurse educators and clinical nurses with access to quality doctoral programs in nursing while remaining in their home environments. In addition, smaller or newly established doctoral programs would be able to offer a wider variety of elective coursework without recruiting and hiring additional faculty, further decreasing their limited available resources. This article describes the initiation and implementation of a successful nursing education collaborative that has gained increasing influence across the country and is recognized by its acronym, NEXus.