I'm Dr. David Zapencki.
Nurse educator, program chair, and the person behind every book, course, and app under the Online Nurse Training name.
I've spent over twenty years teaching nursing students — in classrooms, in skills labs, in clinicals, and in the quiet office hours where a student finally lets you see what's actually getting in their way.
What I kept noticing, year after year, wasn't that students weren't working hard enough. They were working harder than anyone outside nursing education could imagine. The problem was different. They were drowning in information without being shown how to think with it. Memorizing drug facts instead of recognizing drug classes. Reading care plans instead of practicing the reasoning behind them. Cramming for the NCLEX instead of building the judgment the NCLEX is actually trying to measure.
Online Nurse Training is my answer to that gap.
Help nursing students think like nurses.
Not just pass the test. Not just survive the program. Build the underlying clinical reasoning that carries them from their first med pass to their last shift.
Every product in The Pathway — the workbooks, the quiz apps, the Udemy courses, the free study guides — is built around the same idea: nursing students don't need more information. They need better practice with the information they already have. Practice that teaches them to recognize cues, prioritize what matters, choose safe interventions, and explain their reasoning out loud.
That's the practice that builds clinical reasoning. Clinical reasoning, repeated across enough cases, becomes clinical judgment. Clinical judgment, mature and integrated, becomes thinking like a nurse. That's the destination — and every product I build is designed to move students closer to it.
Credentials and current work.
- Doctorate
- Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)
- Master's
- Master of Science in Nursing, Education focus (MSN/Ed)
- Certifications
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Certified Nurse Educator (CNE)
Critical Care Registered Nurse (CCRN) - Current role
- Nursing Program Chair
- Founder
- Online Nurse Training — publisher of the Nursing School & NCLEX Preparation Pathway through Professional Development Publishing
If any of this resonates, start with a free guide.
Four free study guides, one for each subject in The Pathway. They're a low-stakes way to see how I teach — and to start building the kind of practice that turns information into judgment.