A national professional development program fills mentoring gaps for postdoctoral researchers.

The Postdoc Academy: Succeeding as a Postdoc was designed to build postdocs' skills in career transition, career planning, collaborative research, resilience, and self-reflection. This study examined self-reported changes in five skills as learners progressed through the course. Data were collected from participants who responded to both pre- and post-surveys and engaged with the course learning activities. Results from repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance revealed that all of the self-reported perceptions of skills improved significantly upon completion of the course. Hierarchical regressions revealed that underrepresented minority learners had greater gains in their development of skills in career planning, resilience, and self-reflection. Qualitative analysis of learners' responses to learning activities found that postdocs perceived networking and mentor support as contributing factors to their skill advancement while tensions among multiple obligations and concerns of uncertainties were significant challenges to applying those skills.

Theory of change models deepen online learning evaluation.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained traction as resources for professional development. This article presents the method that we used to evaluate a professional development MOOC for postdoctoral trainees that was created by a university consortium in the US. Most approaches to evaluating MOOCs focus on analysis of participation, outcomes from course assignments, self-reported learning outcomes, course completion and user pathways through the online content or clickstream data. Few published evaluations describe in detail how learning happens within online courses and the anticipated medium and longer term cognitive and behavioral outcomes on participants. This work aims to guide those who are designing, implementing and evaluating MOOCs through applying theories of change to focus evaluation on the process of learning. This approach can be used as a complement to traditional approaches for evaluating MOOCs. We described how we worked with the MOOC team building the content to develop a theory of change for each module (or lesson) within the MOOC and used the theory of change to guide evaluation of short and medium term participant cognitive, affective and attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes. Finally, we share lessons learned and suggestions for implementing theories of change in both the design and evaluation phases of MOOC development.