Online Classes for Medical Students During COVID-19 Pandemic: Through the Eyes of the Teaching Faculty
Author(s): Shruti Bhargava*
Abstract
Background: Today, the widespread COVID 19 pandemics has threatened medical education of undergraduate students unprecedently. During the lockdown, with the principles of social distancing, all the classroom teaching for these students had to be suspended, all over the world. Thus, at one point of time, all undergraduate teaching learning had come to a standstill. This study was conducted to gather the perception of teaching faculty about the live online classes during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Methods: We started regular live tele teaching through video conference platform, Cisco WebEx software, in our institute where two classes were held daily for each of the four batches of MBBS. The perception of all the forty faculty, who took these online classes was collected at the end of two months of such teaching.
Results: The faculty perceived the online classes on a positive note, during the present pandemic situation, within limitations. But they also felt that such classes cannot replace the classroom teaching after the present emergency gets over.
Conclusions: This study about the perception of faculty for these live online classes for medical undergraduate students concluded that this endeavor is a welcome stop gap arrangement in the time of COVID pandemic, so that the learning continues.
To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study of its kind, dealing with the innovation done to deal with undergraduate medical education during the COVID 19 pandemic.