Emergency Transition to Virtual Education during COVID-19: Lessons and Opportunities for Experiential Learning and Practice Socialization

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. In response to COVID-19, health professional schools made an emergency transition to virtual learning. The speed and scope of virtual learning adoption is unprecedented and poses major challenges to health professional schools to maintain important elements of their curriculum and pedagogical structure. Some challenges include maintaining fidelity of experiential and bedside clinical learning, along with practice socialization. These challenges may be amplified in traditionally underrepresented and poor students. There are some practical solutions to minimize these challenges. For example, health professional schools can find new means of encouraging community engagement and mentor-mentee relationships such as using technology to connect students with faculty and patients to mitigate losses in clinical experiences, and using video-chat over speech only forms of communication that can help establish some sense of learning community while online. Health professional schools may also use the COVID-19 crisis to establish new norms in health profession education, by developing hybrid educational content between multiple programs or health professions, with the goal of establishing or strengthening interprofessional educational opportunities and increasing access to them.