Teleconferencing as a teaching modality for clinical year medical students: Lessons from COVID-19

The Asia Pacific Scholar

卷:6

Rajeswari Kathirvel¹  Chee Wai Ku²  Xin Rong Goh³  Kok Hian Tan³ 

[1] Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore;

[2] Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, KK Women's & Children's Hospital, Singapore;

[3] Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;

关键词: medical education;    teleconferencing;    teaching modalities;    medical students;    covid-19;    disease outbreaks;    pandemics;   

DOI  :  10.29060/TAPS.2021-6-4/OA2418

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Introduction: Disease outbreaks (DO) result in unprecedented changes to the healthcare industry with far-reaching implications for medical education. The need to adapt to the fluidity during DO requires the delivery of the clinical medical curriculum to be flexible and effective. There is a lack of well-established guidelines on how medical education should be delivered during DO. This study aimed to explore the efficacy of teleconferencing-based platforms (TBP) as a teaching modality to overcome the challenges of clinical year medical education amidst a global pandemic and possibility of its use when there are no disease outbreaks (NDO).Methods: A cross-sectional survey amongst 144 undergraduate clinical year students from a medical school in Singapore was conducted from May to June 2020, to explore their perspectives on TBP compared to physical venue-based platforms (PVBP). The survey consisted 5-point Likert scale and open-ended questions. Statistical and thematic analyses were performed.Results: TBP provides greater convenience in travelling, note-taking and ability to overcome administrative challenges. Students strongly recommended its use in DO and NDO. However, students faced increased distractibility, decreased engagement and ease of raising questions, with a lower efficacy in content delivery. The above is dependent on the type of lessons delivered - clinical skills-based or didactic sessions.Conclusion: TBP is a promising teaching modality for DO with promising possibility of extending its use to NDO. We propose a tri-faceted approach to target improvement in content delivery on TBP, mainly with measures to target propensity for decreased engagement and increased distractibility and to address the technology-related concerns.

【 授权许可】

Unknown