Enhancing Effectiveness of Residents' Virtual Medical Education During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic inherently led to the transfer of face-to-face learning to virtual learning on a global level. Virtual learning was never a popular learning method in Saudi Arabia. Due to the preconceived notions about virtual education, our residents' learning outcomes in the early stages were affected negatively. Methods:We compared the knowledge acquisition from different teaching methods, face-to-face, virtual didactic, and virtual interactive lectures, by comparing the residents' exam scores for MCQ tests, which assessed memorization of some information discussed during these different teaching sessions. Results:There was a statistically significant drop in the residents' exam marks when we switched from face-to-face to virtual didactic learning (p-value 0.0469). But we found no difference when we compared their exam marks for tests done after the interactive virtual learning and that after the previous face-to-face learning (p-value 0.0547). Conclusion:Virtual learning is an effective way of learning in medical education, even with those who are new to this teaching method, on the condition we do it using the appropriate andragogical approach. In this paper, we also discussed various ways that can be used to enhance learning acquisition from online teaching sessions.