E-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: the impact on medical students’ perceived academic progress

The Covid-19 pandemic created one of the most stressful situations all around the world and affected almost all activity sectors, including medical education. Sudden restrictions on social interactions forced an abrupt transition from amphitheatres and physical examinations to online lectures and, despite difficulties, the academic community rallied to continue teaching. The swift transition left academia with no time to design custom platforms and confined the university to choose among a set of readily available tools: Google Classroom and Google Meet, Zoom and Moodle, which offer a basic framework for substituting the students’ needs. In some countries, ours included, most of the summer term took place online.

Although pandemics are, hopefully, rare events, the experience with online classes should be used to improve and expand current teaching models, since this improvement could be a means to a general improvement of the medical teaching system. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic is not finished yet and many restrictions continue, affecting at least 20% of the total undergraduate training of several generations of doctors.

The study aims to identify – within the medical students’ community - transferable aspects of online classes to the post-pandemic teaching in the perspective of blended learning. We deliberately chose to omit the examination part of the educational process in order to set the focus on the delivery of teaching.

In this first analysis of the results, the degree of progress in reaching a high professionalism level was analyzed starting from the self-assessment of professional growth, that was previously found to be in good agreement with the actual achievements as derived from the traditional formative examination. [1]