Comparison of healthcare professionals' motivations for using different online learning materials.

Importance: Online learning is increasingly prevalent throughout all stages of medical education. There is little published literature exploring what motivates healthcare professionals to engage with different types of e-learning content. Learner motivations must be understood in order to design effective educational solutions and to optimize the overall online learning experience.

Objective: Examine engagement, satisfaction, and motivations of healthcare professionals using OPENPediatrics, an open-access medical e-learning platform.

Methods: Retrospective analysis of online survey data. Users were asked to report engagement and satisfaction with the platform, as well as to select motivations for using different types of content on the site: Courses, Simulators, and World Shared Practice Forum videos.

Results: Majority of respondents were physicians and nurses in North America and Europe. Overall satisfaction with the platform was high. Most frequently cited motivations for using Courses and Simulators were: learn basic and in-depth information around topics, and learn how to deliver safer or more effective patient care. For World Shared Practice Forum videos, most commonly cited motivations were: learn in-depth information about a topic, learn the latest advances or developments in an area, and learn how to deliver safer or more effective patient care.

Interpretation: We appreciated both commonalities and differences in learning motivations among clinicians accessing different kinds of medical e-learning content. Respondents were consistently motivated to learn in order to deliver safer or more effective patient care, but they reported using different types of educational content depending on whether they were learning basic information versus updating or changing their knowledge.