Continuing Professional Development via Social Media or Conference Attendance: A Cost Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Professional development is essential in the health disciplines. Knowing the cost and value of educational approaches informs decisions and choices about learning and teaching practices. OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of this study was to conduct a cost analysis of participation in continuing professional development via social media compared with live conference attendance. METHODS: Clinicians interested in musculoskeletal care were invited to participate in the study activities. Quantitative data were obtained from an anonymous electronic questionnaire. RESULTS: Of the 272 individuals invited to contribute data to this study, 150 clinicians predominantly from Australia, United States, United Kingdom, India, and Malaysia completed the outcome measures. Half of the respondents (78/150, 52.0%) believed that they would learn more with the live conference format. The median perceived participation costs for the live conference format was Aus $1596 (interquartile range, IQR 172.50-2852.00). The perceived cost of participation for equivalent content delivered via social media was Aus $15 (IQR 0.00-58.50). The majority of the clinicians (114/146, 78.1%, missing data n=4) indicated that they would pay for a subscription-based service, delivered by social media, to the median value of Aus $59.50. CONCLUSIONS: Social media platforms are evolving into an acceptable and financially sustainable medium for the continued professional development of health professionals. When factoring in the reduced costs of participation and the reduced loss of employable hours from the perspective of the health service, professional development via social media has unique strengths that challenge the traditional live conference delivery format.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".