The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of completing online diaries with specific topics on students’ self-regulated behavior in online courses. Also, this study sought to determine the impact of completing online diary topics with different topics (content-based or experience-based) on students’ self-regulation in online courses. The participants’ use of learning strategies was assessed to aid in this investigation. The research design utilized for this study was a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design. The participants of this study included 30 undergraduate students from a variety of majors who were enrolled in one of two online courses. Of the 30 participants, 15 of the participants were in the content-based treatment group while the other 15 were in the experience-based treatment group. Convenience sampling was used to recruit participants for this study. Using data collected from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and the diary entries submitted by the participants, the researcher did not find associations between completion of online diary topics and participants’ self-regulated behavior within the online courses. However, results did indicate that the content-based group reported higher levels of critical thinking usage than the experience-based group after the treatment was administered.