Abstract
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, to decrease the risk of viral spread, universities in the United States were forced to transition traditional classroom learning to online
learning formats. Instructors who were teaching face-to-face classes had to urgently
transition those courses to all-online. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological
study was to explore university nursing instructors’ lived experiences of transitioning
from on-campus teaching-learning modality to online teaching-learning modality during
the COVID-19 pandemic. An interpretative phenomenological analysis design was used
as the research method. Purposeful sampling was used and six nursing instructors from
the U.S. were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol. Three key themes emerged
from the study, (1) “What is happening?”, (2) Going all online, and (3) Returning to a
new normal. The findings led to three practical solutions for universities to implement if
a future crisis were to force nursing instructors to transition on-campus teaching-learning
modality to an online teaching-learning modality.