Distant education in Moroccan medical schools following COVID-19 outbreak at the early phase of lockdown: Were the students really engaged?

The Coronavirus pandemic outbreak has induced many urgent adaptation measures in Morocco including medical education that had to abruptly adopt an exclusive distant education approach, without former sufficient preparation. The present study aimed to assess medical students’ engagement in their acutely implemented distant learning and to identify factors that could be associated to the students’ studying engagement levels. Medical students from 1st to 5th years of medical studies, enrolled in all Moroccan public medical faculties were invited to fill-in an anonymous online questionnaire. 3174 medical students took part in the study, with a mean age of 20.4 +/- 1.8 years old, and 65.4% of them were women. 90% of the participants reported moderate to drastic change of their sleeping habits and 65% suffered depression symptoms. 20.7% of students didn't engage at all in their learning, 26% studied for less than one hour daily, and only 53.3% studied for one hour or more daily. Only 46.4% of the participants had access to multimedia studying resources and only 20.9% were offered online interactive sessions with their teachers. 41.8% of the participants were unsatisfied from their distant learning experience. Lower studying engagement rates were significantly associated with older age, male gender, change of sleeping patterns, depression symptoms, and also with lack of access to multimedia studying resources and poor general satisfaction from the distant learning experience. Distant Education needs to include more interactive activities and more multimedia studying resources to engage students more efficiently in their self-regulated learning.