COVID-19 affected “face to face” interaction with the professors. Lessons learned from traditional learning.

Abstract

Abstract Many university programs have implemented/utilized online teaching platforms for various reasons over the last decade. This has allowed for both students and professors to track progress in the course, as well as providing a method to submit assignments over the traditional paper submission. These are just a few of the reasons that online platforms have gained popularity, though many have been caught off-guard by the sudden full transition from traditional/hybrid learning to online learning. Through the use of surveys, we have aimed to study the effects, both positive and negative, that this transition to online learning has had on university students. Our group has pooled our questions into a larger set of survey questions that have been broken into smaller surveys, so that we can encourage a response rate that allows us to maximize our results without having students lose interest in answering all of our questions. In this current research, we have focused on the major loss in the current pandemic induced learning. Our preliminary data suggests that one of the major things that students feel is that they miss face to face interactions with their professors. Since we looked at a cohort of professional pharmacy school students where experiential education is one of the major aspects of training future pharmacists. The students believe that the practical aspect of learning needs supervision, oversight, mentoring, and physical presence of teachers. Most of the students feel that no matter how realistic the internet world of learning seems, it can not compensate the training and practice required in a professional school of pharmacy. We conclude that nothing can compensate or simulate the loss of profound student-teacher interaction.