Comparing Web-Based and In-Person Educational Workshops for Canadian Occupational Therapists and Understanding Their Learning Experiences: Mixed Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Do-Live-Well (DLW) framework is an occupation-focused health promotion approach. Occupational therapists (OTs) have been interested in training opportunities regarding this framework. Traditionally, in-person continuing educational interventions are the main way that OTs obtain knowledge, but web-based learning has become popular among health care professionals. However, its effectiveness and learners' experience in web-based learning have not been well-studied in occupational therapy education. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the web-based and in-person educational DLW workshops for Canadian OTs and to understand their experiences in both workshop types. METHODS: An explanatory sequential mixed methods study design was used, where quantitative data were collected first, then qualitative data were used to explain the quantitative findings. A quasi-experimental design and interpretative description methodology were used in the quantitative and qualitative phases, respectively. RESULTS: Quantitative results were as follows: a total of 43 OTs completed pre-, post-, and follow-up evaluations (in-person group: 21/43, 49%; web-based group: 22/43, 51%). Practice settings of the participants varied, including geriatric, hospital, long-term, mental health, pediatric, and primary settings. The primary outcome was as follows: there were no statistically significant differences in knowledge changes at the 3 time points (P=.57 to P=.99) between the groups. In the web-based group, the knowledge scores at follow-up were lower compared with the posttest results, meaning that knowledge gain was reduced over time (P=.001). The secondary outcomes were as follows: there were statistically significant differences between the groups in factors influencing DLW adoption at posttest (P=.001) and in satisfaction with the workshop (P<.001) at posttest in favor of the in-person group. Qualitative results were as follows: a total of 18 OTs (9/18, 50% from each group) participated in an individual interview. Five themes were identified regarding learners' workshop experiences: relevance to their practices and interests may improve learning, a familiar learning environment may facilitate learning, synchronous in-person interaction is valuable in the learning process, ease of access to learning should be considered, and flexibility in web-based learning can be both beneficial and challenging. CONCLUSIONS: The quantitative results of this study reported no difference in knowledge acquisition between the in-person and web-based groups, indicating that web-based education is as effective as in-person workshops. However, participants' satisfaction with the workshop was statistically significantly higher for the in-person workshop. The qualitative findings described the participants' perceived benefits and challenges of each educational format. The participants in both the web-based and in-person workshop groups valued in-person interactions in learning, but the participants in the web-based workshop group expressed web-based learning lacked in-person-like interactions. Thus, adding synchronous in-person interactions to web-based learning may improve learners' educational experiences in web-based occupational therapy and continuing education.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".