Influence of Prior Online Course Experience on the Perceived Benefit of an Online Professional Development Course

Abstract

In 2011, the American Physiological Society (APS) offered an online professional development course entitled “Writing and Reviewing for Scientific Journals.” This 6‐week course was conducted exclusively online via the Blackboard Learn platform. Fifty percent of the students taking this course had previous online course experience and fifty percent did not. Therefore, this study sought to determine if students with previous online course experience found the online course easier, more useful, and more beneficial than students who did not have previous online course experience. To evaluate these questions, students were required to complete an anonymous post‐course survey consisting of Likert Scale questions and additional comment sections. Surprisingly, students without online course experience tended to find the online course more easy to use than students with online course experience. Additionally, although perceived usefulness of the course components tended to be the same between students from both groups, students with online course experience tended to rate their overall perceived skill strength after the course as higher than the students without online course experience. These finding suggests that prior online course experience may increase students’ perceived benefit of an online professional development course.