The Impact of COVID-19 on Education: A Cross-Sectional Study of Distance Learning among Medical Students.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic affected educational institutions and caused the transfer to distance learning. The study aimed to assess medical students' satisfaction with synchronous distance learning (SDL) during the pandemic and predict their choice of it in the future.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among undergraduate medical students at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in July 2021. An online questionnaire was used to collect data on demographic and educational characteristics, satisfaction, and perspective on the future choice of SDL. IBM SPSS Statistics, version 26, was used to analyze the qualitative data on descriptive and inferential statistics.

Results: Students' satisfaction and future choice of SDL were 43.2% and 20.2%, respectively. Regression analysis revealed the significance of SDL predictors with a direct relationship in the case of gender and academic performance and predictors with an inverse relationship in the case of residency, student life satisfaction, and SDL with student satisfaction. In the predictive model, student satisfaction and probability of future choice of SDL over traditional learning were 59.5% and 43.5%, respectively; over hybrid learning, it was 20.2% of students.

Conclusion: The research findings suggested that slightly less than half of the respondent medical students were satisfied by distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic when their satisfaction probability was significantly higher in the predictive model. The predictive model of perspective of choice of distance learning did not show statistically significant results compared with traditional and hybrid learning.