Assessing the resident physicians’ perceptions of the use of webinars to support training during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected education systems worldwide. The disruption in education systems has impacted over 90% of the student population of the world (UNESCO, 2020). Electronic learning (e-learning), a form of teaching which involves electronic equipment and tools permits interaction between people involved in the education process. An example of which is the webinars. Webinars allow large groups of participants to engage in online discussions or training events and share audio, documents, or slides. OBJECTIVE: We aim to assess the perception of resident physicians on the use of webinars to support learning during COVID-19. METHODOLOGY: This is a cross-sectional study. An adequately powered paper survey was conducted among 123 resident physicians of St. Luke’s Medical Center Global City. A 5-point Likert Scale was used for each of the questions in the questionnaire patterned after that of Nagar (2020). Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Majority of the respondents gave favorable answers to questions on pace of learning/flexibility (91.5%), cost (95.1%), convenience and comfort (95.1%), motivation (76.1%), ease of access (96.1%), visual perception (87.5%), visual difficulty (79.9%), audio perception (83.7%), Internet connection (61.8%), and navigation (83.7%), while Internet connection (28.5%) was seen with the highest disagreement. CONCLUSION: Our data support the acceptability of webinars among resident physicians in a tertiary private hospital as an alternative learning tool in this COVID-19 era where face-to-face interaction or traditional learning is less likely to be employed. RECOMMENDATIONS: We recommend future studies that can focus on the efficacy of the webinars in the improvement of knowledge and practice of medicine by doing pre- and posttests. We also recommend doing a similar study in government hospitals where facilities may not be on par with private hospitals.