COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN DISTANCE AND IN-CLASS LEARNING

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has had immense impact on usual daily life and working activities, forced to adapt to new circumstances. The system of medical education has to solve a number of pressing issues on changing the mode of teaching and learning. Distance learning is often described as a flexible and effective system of non-stop professional education, sensitive to the needs of the society. Distance learning extensively uses internet technologies for communication through video conferences, emails, providing access to learning materials, including multimedia presentations, videos, visual aids, etc. However, this form of learning is not widespread in the training of medical professionals. Notwithstanding the advantages, distance learning needs constant improvement of all parties of educational process that is possible only after analyzing its shortcomings based on own experience and described in relevant reports. The study was aimed at compare the students’ academic performance demonstrated during distance learning and traditional in-class learning. The material of the study included the grades, which medical students got during distance learning and grades they got before the spring quarantine. We also used the data on students' grades for the identical periods of the 2018-2019 academic year. Distance learning during the quarantine was scheduled in accordance with the existing curriculum, and conducted by all educators of the Department of Pathological Anatomy with Autopsy Course and based on the combination of two online platforms: Zoom and Google classroom. During the video conferences at the Zoom platform, the faculty staff explained and discussed the theme material using multimedia presentations, engaged students into different learning activities. To monitor student’s understanding of important concepts, we created online quizzes with seven different question types which are graded automatically Google Classroom. Results can be viewed in a summary format, by individual respondents, or by specific question answers. Quizzes can be assigned to a Google Classroom class and quiz results can be exported to the Google Classroom group. Google classroom was widely used in training students to the national licensing exam “Krok 1. General Medicine”. Our study showed a decline in students’ academic performance through the online learning period. The comparison of students’ academic performance data for the same period of the previous academic year demonstrated that academic progress of students during distance learning decreased compared to the same period of the previous academic year. Thus, several questions arise: what causes this decline and whether it is possible to grant high-quality online learning on the course of pathomorphology. Since it was the first experience when higher medical educational setting faced such a challenge, we can find a clear answer only based on multifactorial analysis of students' academic performance. We can conclude on distance learning and analysis of students’ academic performance that this format did not provide high-quality knowledge acquisition in pathomorphology. Thorough study of all factors impacting students’ learning outcomes and ways to improve distance learning is of great importance in order to prevent any possible challenges in future.