Medical Morphology Training Using the Xuexi Tong Platform During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development and Validation of a Web-Based Teaching Approach

Abstract

Background Histology and Embryology and Pathology are two important basic medical morphology courses for studying human histological structures under healthy and pathological conditions, respectively. There is a natural succession between the two courses. At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly swept the world. During this unusual period, to ensure that medical students would understand and master basic medical knowledge and to lay a solid foundation for future medical bridge courses and professional courses, a web-based medical morphology teaching team, mainly including teachers of courses in Histology and Embryology and Pathology, was established. Objective This study aimed to explore a new teaching mode of Histology and Embryology and Pathology courses during the COVID-19 pandemic and to illustrate its feasibility and acceptability. Methods From March to July 2020, our team selected clinical medicine undergraduate students who started their studies in 2018 and 2019 as recipients of web-based teaching. Meanwhile, nursing undergraduate students who started their studies in 2019 and 2020 were selected for traditional offline teaching as the control group. For the web-based teaching, our team used the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to realize a new “seven-in-one” teaching method (ie, videos, materials, chapter tests, interactions, homework, live broadcasts, and case analysis/discussion). This new teaching mode involved diverse web-based teaching methods and contents, including flipped classroom, screen-to-screen experimental teaching, a drawing competition, and a writing activity on the theme of “What I Know About COVID-19.” When the teaching was about to end, a questionnaire was administered to obtain feedback regarding the teaching performance. In the meantime, the final written pathology examination results of the web-based teaching and traditional offline teaching groups were compared to examine the mastery of knowledge of the students. Results Using the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to conduct “seven-in-one” teaching is feasible and acceptable. With regard to the teaching performance of this new web-based teaching mode, students demonstrated a high degree of satisfaction, and the questionnaire showed that 71.3% or more of the students in different groups reported a greater degree of satisfaction or being very satisfied. In fact, more students achieved high scores (90-100) in the web-based learning group than in the offline learning control group (P=.02). Especially, the number of students with objective scores >60 in the web-based learning group was greater than that in the offline learning control group (P=.045). Conclusions This study showed that the web-based teaching mode was not inferior to the traditional offline teaching mode for medical morphology courses, proving the feasibility and acceptability of web-based teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings lay a solid theoretical foundation for follow-up studies of medical students.

A systematic review of health sciences students’ online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The overall rating score is 4.65 out of 5 1 Khalaf et al (2020) [ 74 ] OL; UG dental students at University of Sharjah Online questionnaire Traditional learning ( N = 65) Cross-sectional study Students were very satisfied with the online exam. Students with online exam experience were more satisfied with OL than students who lack experience with online exam ( p < 0.05) 1 Khan et al (2021) [ 21 ] OL; UG medical students from North India Online questionnaire Traditional learning ( N = 103) Mixed study 62%-80%, showed satisfaction toward OL 1 Kim et al (2020) [ 48 ] OL; UG medical students from Seoul National University Online questionnaire Traditional learning ( N = 456) Cross-sectional study 62.2% of the students were satisfied with OL compared to f2f learning 1 Liu et al (2021) [ 75 ] OL; UG medical students from Shandong First Medical University Online questionnaire Traditional learning ( N = 512) Cross-sectional study 71.3% of the Histology and Embryology students and 82.5% and Pathology students were very satisfied with OL. Only 37% want to return to traditional teaching from Pathology course while 52.1% from Histology and Embryology 1 Menon et al (2021) [ 51 ] OL; UG medical students from college hospital in South India Online questionnaire Traditional learning ( N = 370) Cross-sectional study most students were satisfied with the OL (31% scored high satisfaction, 53.6% scored moderate satisfaction), while only 15.4% were not satisfied 1 Muflih et al (2021) [ 53 ] ...…”

“…A cross-continent comparison of the level of satisfaction was also conducted. From the 13 studies that reported higher satisfaction with the use of online learning approach, six were from Asia [ 26 , 51 , 56 , 62 , 74 , 75 ], five were from Europe [ 32 , 41 , 47 , 66 ], one from America [ 77 ], and one from Africa [ 73 ]. Meanwhile, five studies from Asia [ 43 , 58 , 61 , 65 , 68 ] and one study from Africa [ 35 ] revealed that students were not satisfied with online learning.…”

Most Integrated Virtual Images of the Bones in the Teaching of Human Anatomy: Are There Any Differences Between Online and on-Site Tutor?

“…Although in a remote model of the practical classes tutors should understand that the preparation of the students is important in the dynamic development of the study course (Reguera & Lopez, 2021). Tutors should consider students as the main persons in the practical classes while the tutors themselves play the leading role in the process of "teach by learning and research by teaching" (Liu et al, 2021). In face of the necessity to undertake online teaching, our tutors at all levels have had to undertake novel work for the use and creation of the digital images of the skull bones.…”

Virtual Versus Light Microscopy Usage among Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analytic Evidence in Medical Education

“…Accessibility to the slide images outside classroom [35,44,[47][48][49][52][53][54]59,64,67], ability to annotate slides [20,35] and availability of ample free resources led to a more efficient and feasible method of learning [20,34,40,41,44,48,54,67].…”

“…An overall positive acceptance for VM with a higher student satisfaction for VMbased teaching in addition to increased levels of subject interest was another reported advantage [20,22,[35][36][37]39,41,47,49,50,[53][54][55]59,60,64,66,67].…”