Medical and Pharmacy Students Learning Trends in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a source of disruption for many people's lives, but it has also served as a stimulus, changing the medical education environment. In response to the pandemic, UC San Diego School of Medicine converted its in-person preclerkship education into an online format using the software combination of the Zoom video communication, Panopto video platform and Canvas learning platform. By using data from the COVID-19 virtual format (CVF) and the in-person format (IPF) in the fall of 2019 extracted from Panopto and Canvas, we compared student lecture viewing trends and analyzed Canvas student usage to determine if student engagement to educational material has differed between the two learning structures. Methods: Student lecture viewing data were collected by using the “Analytics” function built into Panopto which recorded student views, lecture viewing completion, viewing trends over time, and total time spent watching lectures. On Canvas, data on student click-through rates for resources provided to students were extracted comparing this year to last year. Data acquired from Zoom was used to observe student attendance during lectures that were held synchronously. All statistics (t-tests) were calculated using Prism. Results: In the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a higher proportion of CVF students that watched the recorded live lectures compared to the in-person 2019 class (p=0.011). The CVF class also had a higher recorded lecture completion rate (p=0.003). It was observed that on average, 57.2% of CVF students attended live Zoom lectures if they were held. 56.3% of all CVF students also watched the live lecture recording, which indicates that a small proportion of students are re-watching the lecture after viewing them synchronously. Discussion: CVF students are more likely to watch and have higher complete rates of recorded live lectures compared to the IPF counterpart. These observations are significant as they indicate a change in student learning behavior in this predominantly virtual environment. Students may be more inclined to the flexibility that the virtual format offers. Further studies should be done to assess student performance between the CVF and IPF formats.