Training factors as predictors of students’ self-efficacy beliefs for online journalism practice

The advent of Internet technologies has heralded new skill demands in the media industry. Since journalism education mainly takes its cue from industry trends, media training institutions are now forced to adjust their curricula and teaching styles to produce online-ready graduates. Drawing on aspects of self-efficacy theory, this correlation study employs a questionnaire to explore how different training factors influence students’ self-efficacy beliefs for online journalism work. A sample of 182 mass communication students from five Rwandan universities participated in the study. Results showed that the training factors explained 29.7% of the variance in the respondents’ self-efficacy beliefs for online journalism work, with positive correlations between all the training factors and the students’ self-efficacy. In particular, the types of online skills (? =.069) and availability of teaching facilities (?=.076) contributed a larger part of the online self-efficacy beliefs than teaching styles (?=.018). These results showed that training factors have a role in boosting students’ beliefs in their capacity to execute online journalism tasks in the industry. Results suggested that journalism educators especially need to enhance different online journalism teaching approaches in order to better develop future professionals who are online-confident for the workplace. © 2020, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR). All rights reserved.