Digital teaching and learning of surgical skills (not only) during the pandemic: a report on a blended learning project

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital teaching approaches should be used wherever possible. In this article we report on our project for digital teaching and learning of surgical skills. The compulsory elective “Intensivkurs Chirurgische Techniken” for medical students starting with semester 5 was designed as a blended learning course. One week before the face-to-face class, the students receive the learning and teaching material online in a Moodle course. In the face-to-face class, live demos of procedures (e.g. performing skin and intestinal sutures) are presented by the teachers. The learners then perform the practical procedures and record themselves with the camera of an iPad. They publish their videos in the Moodle course via an Opencast plugin. The implementation of an annotation tool enables everyone in the Moodle course to add free-text comments to selected parts of the videos (video-assisted feedback and coaching). As a result of the pandemic, the face-to-face class is being moved to a digital learning environment. For this purpose, we are extending the existing system with a web conference tool (BigBlueButton).