Students’ and Teachers’ Perspective on the Implementation of Online Medical Education in China: A Qualitative Study

OBJECTIVE: Due to the quarantine measures during the outbreak of COVID-19, medical schools in China had to shift to online education overnight. Researchers wanted to survey the online medical education status quo and find out the underlying challenges and probable solutions in terms of online medical education to better understand improving and developing medical education in China. METHODS: Researchers distributed self-administered and piloted surveys regarding the implementation of online medical education on WeChat and Wenjuanxing. Researchers distributed three phases of online surveys to the undergraduate medical students, and one online survey to the medical teachers on phase three. RESULTS: Online medical education was carried out smoothly in China. Seventy-six percent of the students were satisfied with online medical education, and it hardly changed after a month. Courses with the quiz and live-stream courses were rare compared with courses incorporated with other elements. Most parents would remind their children to study online at home. At first, the biggest challenge of learning online was the lagging platform. Nevertheless, as time went by, the major challenge became the learning motivation. Most students thought it necessary to re-teach face-to-face after online education, while most teachers did not think so. CONCLUSION: Generally speaking, online medical education was satisfying for both students and teachers, although online courses’ diversity with different forms and elements could be enhanced. Infrastructure construction should be considered first for the schools intended to promote online medical education. If the infrastructure were ready, learning motivation would become the biggest challenge for online medical education. Online medical education efficacy evaluation tools need to be developed in the future to narrow the discrepancy of the evaluation between teachers and students.