What does the NUR676 practice experience actually require?

The practice experience is 135 hours of independent, mentor-guided work, not a lecture course and not a supervised clinical rotation with patients. Nursing Education is an indirect-care specialization, so your hours go into the work of teaching nurses, not the bedside. In practice that means you propose a project, a qualified site agrees to host it, a master's-prepared mentor agrees to guide you, and your Excelsior faculty approves the plan before you begin logging hours. Everything hinges on you having lined those pieces up first.

Excelsior's own position is blunt: there is no clinical instruction provided in any program in the School of Nursing. That single sentence is why the search is on you. The university publishes the requirement, reviews what you submit, and grades the outcome, but it does not connect you to a nurse educator willing to volunteer, and it does not open the door to a school of nursing or a hospital education department on your behalf. Excelsior's word for your guide is mentor, not preceptor, and its word for the 135 hours is practice experience, not clinical rotation. Some students still call it a preceptor, so if that is the word in your head, you are in the right place.

Why do Nursing Education students struggle to line this up alone?

Most students discover the requirement while working full time, and cold-outreach to a school of nursing is slow, unfamiliar work. A nurse-educator mentor has to hold a master's degree or higher, has to have real expertise in nursing education, and has to be willing to volunteer their time for no payment, and then your faculty still has to approve them. That is a narrow filter, and the people who fit it are busy. Add the site: a school, a clinical staff-development unit, or a hospital education office may want an affiliation agreement on file and a CastleBranch clearance, both of which take weeks. When any one of the three pieces slips, the whole capstone slips, and a stalled capstone can hold your entire MSN.

The honest problem is timing. Students who begin the search a few weeks before the term almost always run short, because agreements and background checks do not move on a student's schedule. Excelsior asks you to start early, and a four to six month lead time before the capstone is the safe window. Handing the legwork to someone who does it every week is how you protect that window.

Exactly what do we line up for your Nursing Education capstone?

We source and verify the same three things Excelsior requires you to bring, so you approve them instead of chasing them.

What project ideas fit a Nursing Education practice experience?

Answer first: the strongest projects produce something a school or education department can actually use, and they fall into three buckets. Curriculum work is the classic choice, building or revising a nursing curriculum, a syllabus, or a competency map. Course design is a tighter version, developing a single course, module, or simulation from objectives through assessment. A teaching practicum is the most hands-on, where you plan, deliver, and evaluate instruction under your mentor with real learners. We help you pick the one your site will host and shape it so the scope lands cleanly inside 135 hours.

• Curriculum: build or revise a program curriculum, syllabus, or competency framework.
• Course and content design: develop a course, module, simulation, or online unit end to end.
• Teaching practicum: plan, teach, and evaluate instruction with a mentor and live learners.
• Faculty and staff development: design and run an in-service or onboarding education program.

How many hours, and where do they go?

All 135 hours belong to the NUR676 capstone and the independent project inside it. There is no separate rotation to schedule and no direct patient care at this level. The table below shows where the Nursing Education requirement sits next to the other Excelsior MSN capstones, so you can see it is the same 135-hour structure across specializations.

These are Excelsior's published figures for the graduate capstones. Confirm the exact requirement against your current Excelsior catalog, since program details can change between catalog years.

Who qualifies as a Nursing Education mentor?

A qualified mentor is an individual with a master's degree or higher, real expertise in nursing education, and a willingness to volunteer as your resource, and your Excelsior faculty must approve them before you begin. For this specialization that usually means a master's-prepared nurse educator, a nursing faculty member, a clinical education specialist, or a Certified Nurse Educator (CNE). The mentor is never paid, by Excelsior or by us; they volunteer, and our fee covers only the sourcing and verification, never a payment to the mentor. We confirm eligibility before you commit, so you are not left discovering after the fact that your contact does not meet the standard.

Written and maintained by the Excelsior Preceptor placement team. Facts verified against Excelsior University nursing program and catalog pages. Last updated July 3, 2026.

Sources: Excelsior University: MS in Nursing Education (mentor-guided capstone) · ACEN: Excelsior University master's accreditation record · Excelsior University: College of Nursing and Health Sciences Catalog (April 2023)