Medical education during COVID-19 associated lockdown: Faculty and students’ perspective

BACKGROUND: The lockdown imposed due to novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in adopting electronic learning (e-learning) as the means of education in various institutions all over India. This study aimed to collect the experiences of faculty and students regarding e-learning in medical colleges during COVID-19 and to analyse the likely perceived benefits and problems to choose blended learning activities after the COVID crisis. METHODS: A survey-based study was conducted among undergraduate students and faculty members in medical colleges of Delhi-NCR. RESULT: Two hundred forty-eight medical students and 23 faculty members participated in the study. Two hundred twelve (85.4%) students considered medical education to be severely affected during the lockdown and 219 (88.3%) students found the online classes to be useful. Poor connectivity followed by lack of human interface and poor sound or acoustics were the major hindering factors, whereas convenience and access were reported as important facilitating factors. In the postlockdown phase, 135 (54.4%) students want online classes to be continued in addition to classroom teaching for the cognitive domain, 42 (16.9%) students want it for both cognitive and psychomotor domain and 60 (24.1%) do not want online classes. The majority of the faculty members (65.2%) were in favour of including online teaching modules in routine curriculum and 69.6% suggested a 70%:30% distribution of traditional and online classes after the COVID lockdown. CONCLUSION: Implementation of e-learning within the existing curriculum is bound to be challenging; however, it remains the only solution during COVID-19 imposed lockdown for maintaining the chain of learning.