Providing an interactive undergraduate elective on safety culture online – concept and evaluation

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult to maintain high quality in medical education. As online formats are often considered unsuitable, interactive workshops and seminars have particularly often been postponed or cancelled. To meet the challenge, we converted an existing interactive undergraduate elective on safety culture into an online event. In this article, we describe the conceptualization and evaluation of the elective. METHODS: The learning objectives of the safety culture elective remained unchanged, but the teaching methods were thoroughly revised and adapted to suit an online setting. The online elective was offered as a synchronous two-day course in winter semester 2020/21 during the “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. At the end of each day, participating students evaluated the elective by completing an online survey. Items were rated on a six-point Likert scale. We used SPSS for data analysis. RESULTS: Twenty medical undergraduates completed the elective and rated it extremely positively (1.1 ± 0.2). Students regard safety culture as very important and felt the learning objectives had been achieved. Moreover, they were very satisfied with the design and content of the elective, and especially with interactive elements like role-play. Around 55% of participants would recommend continuing to offer the online elective after the pandemic. CONCLUSIONS: It makes sense to offer undergraduate medical students online elective courses on safety culture, especially during a pandemic. The elective described here can serve as a best practice example of how to teach safety culture to undergraduates, especially when physical presence is unfeasible. Electives requiring a high degree of interaction can also function well online. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03541-1.