gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Last year, teaching, which mainly took place in person up to this point, suddenly changed into online courses. The required resources were often not established sufficiently. To investigate the impact of this radical change, we compared the evaluation of a revision course at the beginning of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020 to its evaluation during the previous years.

Methods: We analyzed an internal medicine revision course at an advanced study phase in person versus online evaluated by medical students. Therefore, we compared the evaluation in the years 2016 to 2020, in which the course was organized online in 2020. The course took place for five days and covered cardiology, infectiology, angiology, pneumology, gastroenterology, metabolism, rheumatology, hematology, nephrology, and endocrinology. Each topic was presented by the same lecturer every year. The online evaluation questionnaire included assessing relevance, structure, benefit, and learning effect with marks ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Additionally, the students were asked to mark the course from 1 (very good) to 6 (unsatisfactory).

Results: The overall grading (see figure 1 [Fig. 1]) of the revision course ranged from 1.3±0.6 in 2019 to 1.6±0.8 in 2020 and 1.6±0.6 in 2016. The difference was significant at p=0.005 (2019 v. 2020), and p<0.001 (2019 v. 2016). Concerning the course structure, the students’ satisfaction was equal over all evaluated years (mean=1.16). We observed a significant difference in the learning effect in 2016 (1.9±0.8) compared to 2017 (1.6±0.8, p<0.001), 2019 (1.5±0.6, p<0.001), and 2020 (1.6±0.8, p=0.042). The students attributed a high relevance to the course (mean=1.08) and rated their benefit from 1.2±0.5 in 2019 to 1.4±0.7 in 2017 (p=0.0119).

Discussion: The presented advanced internal medicine revision course represents a useful tool to refresh and consolidate relevant learning contents. We observed an improvement of the course rating starting from 2016. Organizing the course online did not lead to a worse evaluation, except for the overall grade, which went down to the state of 2016. Therefore, we state that the changed teaching format did not affect structure, benefit, learning effect, and relevance of the course, but the general circumstances. As we did not change the construction of the questionnaire, technical affairs, like connection, visual and acoustic issues, were not evaluated, which could have had a considerable impact on the general marking.

Take home messages: Maintaining a high quality of an annual revision course rapidly changed to online lessons was possible. Nonetheless, both the teaching and the questionnaire could profit from further adaptions to the new online format, e.g., evaluating technical issues.