The virtual classroom can be a great forum for online nursing graduate students to explore topics such as nursing ethics and disease prevention.

But when it comes to mastering tasks like performing physical exams and ordering diagnostic tests, students will need to work with actual patients — not avatars.

Enter the clinical experience, an opportunity for online nursing students to acquire new skills while working with nurses and physicians in their own communities. Most online nursing master’s and doctoral programs will require students to spend a certain number of hours in a clinical setting. The exception are nonclinical programs that focus on nursing education or administration, which may require students to complete a different kind of hands-on learning.

[Explore the 10 cheapest online graduate nursing programs for out-of-state students.]

For busy prospective graduate students drawn to online education because of its flexibility, the idea of finding and completing a clinical experience can be overwhelming. Below are three facts about the clinical training graduate nursing students will need outside of class.

— Not every student can be an online nursing student in every state. Before students apply to an online out-of-state graduate nursing program with a clinical component, they need to make sure the program is authorized by their home state, says Pamela Jeffries, dean of the George Washington University School of Nursing.

Many states have reciprocal agreements with each other, but not all do, requiring each school to deal individually with state requirements. While this is a complicated issue for school officials, Jeffries says it doesn’t need to be for students. “Just call the school and make sure you can be a student,” she says.

— Students will likely play a role in finding their clinical experience. In most cases, students don’t need to have any clinical training arranged before they apply to programs. But once they get in, they will probably need to start searching for preceptors — nurse practitioners or physicians who serve as mentors and teachers.

Many online master’s in nursing programs have relationships with preceptors across the country and can direct students to those individuals. In cases where programs don’t have a large network of preceptors available, they often rely on students to tap their own professional connections. Once students find a preceptor who agrees to participate, that person’s information is then passed along to the nursing programs, which handle contracts and ensure the preceptor is qualified.

[Weigh the cost of an online master’s in nursing. ]

“Most of the time we don’t have preceptors in every city in the U.S., so we talk to students about networking and how that works,” says Susan VanBeuge, an assistant nursing professor at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. That process can take time, she says, so students should start seeking people months before their clinical experience is slated to start.

Brandie Clark, of Prescott, Arizona, avoided the stress of finding a clinical placement by choosing a program that did it for her.

“I had heard horror stories of other programs where students had issues finding preceptors and their graduation was delayed and they weren’t meeting their requirements,” says Clark, who is in her fourth semester at the nursing school at Simmons College in Massachusetts.

At Simmons, she worked with a clinical placement specialist who was ultimately responsible for finding preceptors. “It was a mixture of her finding some sites for me and me giving her some leads on places,” Clark says. “She would be the one who would call and ask initially.”

— Programs have strict criteria for preceptors. Students will likely have to find several preceptors throughout their studies, and they can’t just be anyone.

Ideally, school officials say, students want to work with several health professionals with different specialties in line with the curriculum. An aspiring family nurse practitioner, for example, would want to work with nurse practitioners with experience in women’s health, gerontology and pediatrics.

[Learn how to get accepted into a top online graduate nursing program.]

Most programs have similar guidelines about who fits the preceptor criteria. Students usually can’t find a preceptor within their own practice group and can’t get paid for their experience. Preceptors — who aren’t paid, either — can’t typically be family members.

The majority of preceptors are based in the U.S., though GWU’s program has worked with preceptors on military bases and would assess international clinical experience on a case-by-case basis, Jeffries says.

In many cases, school officials check in regularly with preceptors and students to see how the clinical experience is going. At some programs, such as Simmons and GWU, online nursing faculty will do in-person site visits to assess both the preceptor and the student.

Clark hasn’t had a site visit yet. She’s heard they are a good learning experience, if a bit nerve-racking.

“Not that I don’t feel prepared, but just the fact that a professor will be following me around watching how I perform my assessments, interact with patients and conduct the office visit makes me a bit nervous,” she says.

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Demystify the Clinical Component of Online Graduate Nursing Programs originally appeared on usnews.com