Teaching psychotherapy skills online and asynchronously: A pilot study

Developing helping skills (i.e. counselling skills that promote exploration, insight, and action from clients; Hill, 2019) is essential for counselling trainees’ confidence and skill application. Availability of online instruction for psychotherapy skills has been steadily increasing since the pandemic, although evidence of its effectiveness is still scarce. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a graduate counselling skills asynchronous online course on students’ counselling self-efficacy. Twenty-eight Master’s students enrolled on an online graduate counselling skills course completed pre- and post-assessments at the beginning (Time 1; T1) and end (Time 2; T2) of the 14-week long course. Pre-post differences were tested using a within-subjects t-test. The analysis revealed significant changes in both counselling and multicultural counselling self-efficacy from time point 1 to time point 2, with large effect sizes (Cohen’s d>1.0). Our findings suggest that fully asynchronous online learning formats can effectively increase counselling students’ confidence as trainees.