Effects of realistic e-learning cases on students' learning motivation during COVID-19
Keeping up motivation to learn when socially isolated during a pandemic can be challenging. In medical schools, the COVID-19 pandemic required a complete switch to e-learning without any direct patient contact despite early reports showing that medical students preferred face-to-face teaching in cli...
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Published in | PloS one Vol. 16; no. 4; p. e0249425 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Public Library of Science
21.04.2021
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Keeping up motivation to learn when socially isolated during a pandemic can be challenging. In medical schools, the COVID-19 pandemic required a complete switch to e-learning without any direct patient contact despite early reports showing that medical students preferred face-to-face teaching in clinical setting. We designed close to real-life patient e-learning modules to transmit competency-based learning contents to medical students and evaluated their responses about their experience.
Weekly e-learning cases covering a 10-week leading symptom-based curriculum were designed by a team of medical students and physicians. The internal medicine curriculum (HeiCuMed) at the Heidelberg University Medical School is a mandatory part of clinical medical education in the 6th or 7th semester. Case-design was based on routine patient encounters and covered different clinical settings: preclinical emergency medicine, in-patient and out-patient care and follow-up. Individual cases were evaluated online immediately after finishing the respective case. The whole module was assessed at the end of the semester. Free-text answers were analyzed with MaxQDa following Mayring`s principles of qualitative content analyses.
N = 198 students (57.6% female, 42.4% male) participated and 1252 individual case evaluations (between 49.5% and 82.5% per case) and 51 end-of-term evaluations (25.8% of students) were collected. Students highly appreciated the offer to apply their clinical knowledge in presented patient cases. Aspects of clinical context, interactivity, game-like interface and embedded learning opportunities of the cases motivated students to engage with the asynchronously presented learning materials and work through the cases.
Solving and interpreting e-learning cases close to real-life settings promoted students' motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic and may partially have compensated for missing bedside teaching opportunities. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Competing Interests: Regarding competing interests by performing this work for my Master of Medical Education degree I am happy to confirm that this does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. On behalf of all authors I can declare that no other competing interests are present. |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 1932-6203 |
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0249425 |