Teaching diagnostic reasoning: Transitioning from a live to a distance accessible online classroom in an Adult Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program

The advent of online technologies has led to increased opportunities for colleges of nursing to extend their graduate educational curriculums for expanding numbers of students. Likewise, graduate nursing students now have endless choices regarding programs of study, for which they are no longer limited by geographical locations. Nurse educators are now being confronted with the need to impart increasingly sophisticated knowledge to growing numbers of students via online technologies. Teaching advanced practice students, especially nurse practitioners, within an online teaching platform leads to a special list of challenges for nurse educators. One major issue is the fostering of diagnostic reasoning in an online environment. This article offers an overview of how one Adult Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (ACNP) program transitioned over time from a live classroom curriculum to a distance accessible program.