Evaluating In‐person and Remote Delivery of Human Anatomy Laboratory Education Among Medicine and Dentistry Students

Abstract

As remote teaching has become the forefront of education during the COVID-19 pandemic, anatomy curricula have been forced to adapt to provide quality education for core competencies. In particular, in-person laboratory components have been largely reduced or removed from anatomy teaching to comply with social distancing guidelines. While this has compromised typical learning environments, it offers a unique opportunity to implement remote teaching practices in anatomy and assess their impact on students’ learning. The Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University has initiated a hybrid teaching strategy for the anatomy laboratory curriculum that combines limited hands-on cadaveric dissection with remote laboratory-adjacent activities using a 3-D software application (Complete Anatomy 2021). During the Fall 2020 semester, first-year medicine and dentistry students had the opportunity to experience both teaching formats while learning respiratory and cardiovascular anatomy. Our study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of this hybrid curriculum delivery format by comparing in-person versus digital teaching approaches implemented within the same cohort on the following outcomes: (i) student and instructor experiences, (ii) students’ approach to learning (SAL) and performance, and (iii) faculty time, resources, and cost considerations. Given that hands-on cadaver-based learning is considered the gold standard in anatomy education, we hypothesized that the in-person teaching format would be associated with higher deep and lower surface learning scores, higher grades, and higher resource requirements. The qualitative feedback revealed greater student preference for in-person dissection learning. Comparisons of SAL between in-person and remote delivery formats revealed no significant differences in students’ deep or surface approach scores between in-person and remote delivery formats during the respiratory (deep: p = 0.63; surface: p = 0.84) or cardiovascular (deep: p = 0.18; surface: p = 0.22) anatomy laboratory sessions. Further, no significant differences were noted in mean grades on the laboratory exam when correlated with the respective in-person vs. remote learning format for both respiratory (p = 0.65) and cardiovascular (p = 0.18) blocks. Together, these findings suggest that irrespective of the teaching method utilized, students adopted similar approaches to learning anatomy and performed equally well in summative assessments. Pending a thematic analysis of instructors’ experiences, resource use, and cost considerations, findings from this study will help guide educational policy revisions aimed at maintaining student-centered learning during current and future disruptions to in-person teaching.