Indian Arthroscopy Society Live Webinars: New era of online arthroscopy education during COVID-19 global pandemic

Abstract

Objectives: COVID-19 originated from Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and it spread all over the world, leading to devastating pandemic. This has affected large gatherings of people. As there was lockdown in many countries, elective surgeries like arthroscopy were on hold. Many surgeons were involved in online education. This has helped in developing and achieving the arthroscopy academic content online. We, hereby, put forward our experiences of starting the online education initiative of Indian Arthroscopy Society (IAS). Our objective was to study the response to the IAS webinars and digital contents in view of watch hours, viewerships etc. Materials and Methods: All the data was collected from the analytics of the official YouTube channel. All the digital content including over 100 webinars and 39 video uploads were studied. Results: Total viewers were 88,560. Date-wise average viewers per day were 456.49. The total watch time of all the viewers was 17,539.5015 h (average watch hours were 90.41 h). This also led to around 1,377,647 impressions. There were 100 live webinars and around 39 different arthroscopy videos uploads. Conclusion: Good teamwork among all the members has led to a successful online education initiative, which has supported the need for arthroscopy education in this COVID-19 pandemic. Due to these webinars, the IAS has taken a leap towards the digital education activity and it has positively helped the desiring delegates to update their knowledge, learn, and interact with the leaders in the field of Arthroscopic Surgery, from India and abroad.