Lessons Learned from Developing Digital Teaching Modules for Medical Student Education in Neurosurgery during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic forced students and teachers to rapidly adopt digital education methods. Proper guidance for and refinement of such methods is continuously required. Here, we report on the educational experience students and academic staff at the neurosurgical department of a German university hospital made with digital teaching modules (DTMs) that were newly developed due to the transition to digital teaching during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and on the insights gained therefrom. Methods: Nine newly created DTMs provided students the option to anonymously evaluate each module by assigning a score from 0 (worst value) to 5 (best value) to it. Access count, evaluation count, average evaluation, number of included (interactive) figures, number of presented cases, number of linked publications, and number of included multiple-choice questions for each DTM were recorded retrospectively. For each DTM, we aimed to correlate access count, evaluation count, and average evaluation with the number of included (interactive) figures, number of presented cases, number of linked publications, and number of included multiple-choice questions. E-mail responses from individual students as to the DTMs were collected. Among students, an anonymous, voluntary online survey regarding the DTMs was conducted. Results: Number of figures and average evaluation per DTM were significantly positively correlated (Spearman’s rho = 0.85; p = 0.0037). Number of figures and number of evaluations per DTM were also significantly positively correlated (Spearman’s rho = 0.78; p = 0.0137). Responses from individual students indicated that illustrative cases and interactive figures might further increase DTM popularity. Conclusion: As a valuable adjunct in medical student education, DTMs should contain (interactive) figures, illustrative cases, a scoring option, and the option to give individual feedback towards the academic staff.