E-learning and the virtual transformation of histopathology teaching during COVID-19: its impact on student learning experience and outcome

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Waugh, Samantha
Devin, James
Lam, Alfred King-Yin
Gopalan, Vinod
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2022
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Background: Medical and pathology education has gone through an immense transformation from traditional face-to-face teaching mode to virtual mode during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study evaluated the effectiveness of online histopathology teaching in medical education during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Griffith University, Australia. Methods: Second-year medical students (n = 150) who had previously completed one year of face-to-face histopathology teaching, completed an online questionnaire rating their learning experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic after the completion of their histology and pathology practical sessions. The students' histopathology assessment results were then compared to the histopathology results of a prior second-year cohort to determine if the switch to online histopathology teaching had an impact on students' learning outcome. Results: A thematic analysis of the qualitative comments strongly indicated that online histopathology teaching was instrumental, more comfortable to engage in and better structured compared to face-to-face teaching. Compared to the previous year's practical assessment, individual performance was not significantly different (p = 0.30) and compared to the prior cohort completing the same curriculum the mean overall mark was significantly improved from 65.36% ± 13.12% to 75.83% ± 14.84% (p < 0.05) during the COVID-19 impacted online teaching period. Conclusions: The transformation of teaching methods during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic improved student engagement without any adverse effects on student learning outcomes in histology and pathology education.

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BMC Medical Education

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22

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© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

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Curriculum and pedagogy

Clinical sciences

Specialist studies in education

Social Sciences

Education & Educational Research

Education, Scientific Disciplines

COVID-19

Pathology

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Waugh, S; Devin, J; Lam, AK-Y; Gopalan, V, E-learning and the virtual transformation of histopathology teaching during COVID-19: its impact on student learning experience and outcome, BMC Medical Education, 2022, 22, pp. 22

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