Discussion
Since stepping into the digital world technological advances provide new education platforms, and webinars are starting to gain popularity for health professionals. While this process would take a decade if the Covid-19 pandemic did not exist, the adaptation to digitalization took place very quickly within 1 year as the pandemic affected the whole world. Update and information sharing meetings, which are very important for all healthcare professionals, especially physicians, were naturally affected by this process. After physical seminars are stand overdue to the Covid-19 pandemic for social distancing, the webinars are essential for overcoming social distance for reaching information.
As far as we can reach and find, this study is the first in its kind in the literature, showing audience behaviors that will help planning future webinars. The webinars reached high view rates during the pandemic. The health information seminars were started to shift to online platforms, and the pandemic process is accelerated. The early studies of webinars focus, especially on health professionals’ satisfaction and patients’ education (2,3). The authors concluded that all learners intended to reduce their own cancer risk. Patients felt more knowledgeable, prepared, and confident talking about cancer (2,3). For health professionals (HP), the studies generally use the surveys to investigate the results of webinars and showed that HP is satisfied and significantly improved their information, and they would deal with the webinar topics further (3–5). The education of the processes that can be defined as the education of tomorrow have now been laid. Our study demonstrated that the webinars are becoming the preferable site for reaching information. We explore that the mean watch time slightly increased when attractive topics or semi-live surgeries were broadcasted. However, it still does not exceed 20% of the whole broadcast period, which still seems too low.
The webinars are commonly promoting range 60 to 120 min (4). Our study supported that results, and when the webinars prolonged 90 min, the participants were started to leave. Additionally, the webinars shorter than almost 80 min., we did not investigate any significant fall pattern. Our study demonstrated that the time of leads was similar between groups and suggested that the webinars must be as concise and informative as much as it can be. We cannot interpret mean watch time, the number of the audience after breaks because of our webinars had no break.
The webinars reached top page views at the pandemic period after social distancing dismiss page views nearly decreased before pandemic levels. Furthermore, our suggestion is the webinar’s watch time increasing day by day because of becoming reconciled to broadcasts. The time of reaching maximum participants has come earlier in the pandemic era; however, median watch time was similar between groups. To our guess, watching broadcasts at a comfortable place with other visual stimulus force participants to leave from webinars. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the broadcasting problems due to technical problems and the signal limitations in the country’s infrastructure. Nevertheless, we have to say that webinar is more professional and technical problems have rarely been occurs lately.
Recently, the adverse emotional effects of the pandemic have been discussed. Especially the long working hours of healthcare professionals, social separation from friends, and constant infection also reduce employees’ wellbeing (6). It has been shown to reduce their academic achievement. On the other hand, graduated healthcare professionals are willing to keep themselves updated due to changing treatment modalities and different approaches during the pandemic period. We also think that this increase in the audience depends on this in our study, but that webinars may not give the desired result because they cannot find what they want or are not satisfied with the presentations.
One of the significant limitations of this study is the lack of evaluated participants’ satisfaction using surveys after webinars. Another limitation of the study is no enough demographic data of a considerable portion of participants because of using free access links.