Hi there! Thank you again for enrolling in this free course. Please take the time to read this message before you enroll and start reviewing.
Let me introduce myself as this is likely your first time being exposed to me and content. 🙂
My name is Jeff and I am a licensed occupational therapist. NBCOT Exam Prep was actually not my first project for professional OT content. I started OT Dude anonymously to provide free resources for students and practitioners as a general blog, reference guide, rehab calculators, and salary database. Although there were some great NBCOT Exam Prep resources already, there was still a gap in updated content, especially from a male perspective. Around the same time that I revealed my identity is when I started creating more NBCOT Exam content to help students review for the boards. I decided to keep this content free forever and to release it as early as a beta due to high demand.
So one expectation is that this course is still in development. There may be some errors, typos, missing information, and bugs – so I am sorry for these. I will point out software bugs in the course so that you are made aware of them. The software that I paid for (out of my own personal money) has a bug with some of the score gradings and I am unable to fix this and it would be a pain to transfer it to a new course platform. While the scoring system provides some nice feedback of your knowledge of the material, the software design of the quizzes does not allow for partial credit, so some questions that contain multiple parts are scored “all or nothing”.
Click View Questions after your quiz is graded to see what you answered correctly/incorrectly, no matter what your score.
Please take the time to review the actual responses as my goal will be to include rationales, explanations, and feedback – just like how you should review these in the back of the book of your study guides. Yes, it might be annoying to see you got a 0/1 score (software limitation), even though you answered almost everything correctly, but I encourage you as a future OT to think big picture and not get hung up on these scores. I wish I could fix this, but I am not a programmer and don’t have the time to become one as much as I’d like.
This does not mean that the course is not high quality. If you have seen my other content, you know that I regularly create high-value content for the OT community. The content that I create for OT Dude is part of my professional identity and I treat it just the same as I would a capstone project or the work I do on the job. I spend a lot of time researching, creating, editing, reviewing, and updating my content.
This is one of my many passion projects. I have an OT job, a family, other hobbies, and occupations. Aside from this course, I also create content for OT Dude and guest articles, podcasts, videos. I also mentor students and peers in my free time. As much as I’d like to focus on improving this course full-time, I simply don’t have as much time as I’d like to focus 100% on this course production.
I 100% respect your time. I know that your time is limited because mine is. I know you have other choices when it comes to NBCOT Exam review materials – both free and paid. So I truly appreciate you for giving me a chance to help you review for the NBCOT exam.
In regards to the actual content, I strive to make the study guides and videos as concise and short as possible, but due to the nature of some of the subject matter, some content may require more of your time, such as videos. Feel free to skip ahead of skim these. My goal is to over-prepare you instead of under. I create my content keeping in mind not only helping you pass the boards, but to give you helpful tricks to remember it for practice, gain a wealth of knowledge that is relevant, and provide valuable insights that I have learned along the way (as a mentor would) so that you can feel more prepared and confident for your first job as a new grad.
The last is to please not compare me to other established resources, like NBCOT, AOTA, or even OT Miri. When I was studying for the boards, I didn’t have as many resources as you all these days, and many were out of my financial reach – which may be the case for some of you as well I understand. As such, I encourage you to even use multiple sources to study and help you to review this information.
I don’t have a full team behind me like the NBCOT or AOTA. And even they have made mistakes from time to time, e.g., in their answers and rationales. Just like how publishers of textbooks update their editions or provide a correction page due to their mistakes, I might have some mistakes too. I try to minimize these as much as possible and correct them ASAP when I find them.
This course will only get better and better. There are already thousands enrolled and many enroll every day. I have had nothing but overall positive feedback for this course. I regularly get messages from students who have used my content and passed the boards. You can too! Thank you to all of you who have provided positive feedback, donated, or purchased my other services and products which help to support continued content production for this course and my other OT projects.
If you found my content helpful, I would much appreciate it if you mention OT Dude in the AOTA Exam Prep Facebook Group.
Good luck, take care of yourselves, and wishing you the best in your studies and on the board exam!
– Jeffrey Kou, MSOT, OT/L