What 1,733 Survey Responses Taught Us About Learning Together Online: Continuing Medical Education

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived uninvited and overstayed its welcome, it did at least do one useful thing for medical education: it pushed it online, and in doing so, opened the door to anyone with an internet connection and a genuine desire to learn.

The Canadian Advances in Neuro-Orthopedics for Spasticity Consortium — CANOSC, for those of us who prefer not to say the full name twice — had already been running free, internationally accessible webinars on spasticity management since 2019. When the world went remote, their membership quietly grew to over 2,500 people across 60 countries. That's not a mailing list. That's a community.

Which raised an obvious question: what did all those people actually think?

That's where this research came in — born not from a grand hypothesis, but from the kind of retrospective clarity that only arrives when you look back at what you've already collected. Forty-one post-session surveys. 1,733 responses. A convergent mixed-methods analysis that wove together numbers and words to understand not just whether people were satisfied, but why, and what it meant to them.

The answer, in short, was: quite a lot.

People were satisfied — genuinely, specifically satisfied. Not in the polite, box-ticking way of someone who fills in a survey to be done with it, but in the way that produces quotes like: "I appreciated the lecture and felt as if the speaker was speaking directly to me. It triggered some new ideas that I can put in practice in future." That's someone who showed up, paid attention, and left changed. 88% said they intended to apply what they'd learned. 84% felt it would enhance their competence. These are not small numbers.

What people valued most was, perhaps surprisingly, each other. Content came first at 34%, but discussions and Q&A followed at 29% — nearly a third of respondents citing the conversation as the most valuable part of the event. In a landscape where online learning is often criticised for being passive and isolating, that finding deserves attention. Interaction isn't a nice-to-have. It might be the point.

The collaboration piece ran deeper than expected. Participants didn't just want to learn — they left wanting to do something with other people. Physiotherapists gained insight into physician assessment processes. Physicians found language to communicate with surgeons. Someone in Cameroon was thinking about how to adapt what they'd just heard for their patients in a rehabilitation setting with limited resources. The reach of a one-hour webinar, it turns out, is not one hour.

That global reach also surfaced one of the study's more honest findings: not everything translates equally. Clinicians in lower-income countries sometimes found that the techniques being discussed weren't available to them — yet they showed up anyway, valued the access, and took what they could. One participant put it plainly: "Thanks for sharing the beautiful information with the less privileged." There is something quietly significant in that sentence.

Practical Considerations from Survey Feedback

The study wasn't without its complications. Some attendees found the content too advanced; others found it too basic. This raises a question worth sitting with: when a CME is open to everyone, how does anyone know if it's right for them? Learning objectives alone may not be enough. A simple indicator of recommended prior knowledge could go a long way.

And yes — it turns out Prezi and live translation don't play especially well with Zoom bandwidth. The lesson there is less about any particular tool and more about choosing technology that fits the setting, not the other way around.

This research was conducted across continents — between Mauritius, Canada, and beyond — which feels fitting for a paper about what online learning makes possible. The collaboration that produced it is, in miniature, exactly what the data describes: people connecting meaningfully over screens, across time zones, in service of something they care about.

Because that, in the end, is what the numbers kept pointing toward. Learning isn't just information transfer. It's the forming of bonds — with ideas, with colleagues, with a field you want to contribute to. The webinar format, done well, doesn't just deliver content. It creates a space where a retired clinician in one country and a young physician in another can sit in the same virtual room and come away thinking differently.

That's worth studying. And apparently, worth 1,733 survey responses to say so.

Because if this research showed us anything, it's that some of the most meaningful learning happens when you reach across a very large distance and find someone already reaching back.

Presented at ISPRM 2026, Vancouver. Read the full paper: Soll et al., American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, August 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40042215/

Join us at ISPRM 2026 📍 Rooms 202–204 📅 Monday, May 18, 2026 🕘 9:00 AM – 9:15 AM

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