A viewpoint on virtual teaching in medical education: walking into the digital era with our eyes open.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an explosion of interest in virtual teaching, fundamentally altering the delivery of education worldwide. Students and teachers alike embraced the convenience of learning from home, while platforms offered impressive functionality ranging from live interactive features to offline pre-recorded resources allowing for more flexible self-directed study. However, as the initial enthusiasm waned, significant challenges emerged. Cognitive overload from excessive synchronous virtual content led to disengagement and burnout, with students consuming finite cognitive resources across competing browser tabs rather than encoding new knowledge. Nevertheless, virtual teaching does still have a legitimate role within education, but realizing its potential requires substantial investment in pedagogical design, engagement mechanisms, and staff training. Within medical education, Hafferty's concept of the hidden curriculum-the informal, unscripted learning occurring in clinical environments-highlights what risks being lost. Some knowledge is 'caught' through direct observation rather than formally 'taught', and such learning does not transmit through a video feed. Lave and Wenger's situated learning theory reinforces this: students are apprenticed into clinical communities through physical participation, not passive observation via a screen. Miller's pyramid of clinical competence offers a useful framework-virtual teaching may service the lower levels of knowledge acquisition, but 'shows how' and 'does' require embodied presence, real patients, and authentic clinical environments. The digital transformation of medical education will not reverse. Our responsibility is to embrace its potential while protecting what cannot be digitized: the formation of doctors through presence, participation, and clinical experience.