Online teaching in medical training: Establishing good online teaching practices from cumulative experience

TLDR

Online teaching offers flexible, learner‑centered education that can transcend geographic boundaries, supports self‑directed learning, aligns with competency‑based curricula, and has the potential to become mainstream in medical education. The study seeks to identify and promote good online teaching practices and faculty development programs that build social, pedagogical, managerial, and technical competencies essential for effective online medical education during COVID‑19. The authors propose a framework of good online teaching practices that align curriculum objectives with synchronous and asynchronous interaction, foster higher‑order thinking, active learning, self‑directed learning, continuous feedback, effective time management, respect for diverse learning styles, mentoring, and formative and summative assessments to engage students.

Abstract

Online teaching has the potential to transcend geographical boundaries, is flexible, learner centered and can help students develop self-directed learning skills. The recently introduced competency-based curriculum has also advocated e-learning as an indispensable tool for self-directed learning. For effective online learning, good online teaching practices should be adopted. These include alignment of online teaching and learning with delivery of curriculum and objectives, synchronous, and asynchronous interaction between teacher and student, encouraging the development of higher-order thinking skills, active learning, and self-directed learning in students. In addition, good online teaching practices should have an inbuilt component of feedback and provide for effective time management, respect for diverse talents and ways of learning with continuous monitoring and mentoring of the learners. Online assessments, both formative and summative should also aim to ensure student involvement in the process. Capacity building of faculty through faculty development programs for the development of specific competencies such as social competency, pedagogical competency, managerial competency, and technical competency in the times of COVID-19 is now recognized as the need of the hour. Although online teaching and learning in medical education is new, it has the potential to become mainstream in future.