Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Radiography Education from the Perspectives of Students: A Survey on Medical Imaging Students UniSZA

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many changes in the norms of daily life and affected various fields as well as industries. One of the areas affected by this epidemic is education. Due to the limitation of physical meetings, while avoiding the spread of the virus, learning and teaching activities have changed from physical learning to online learning. Radiography education is also affected where students have to learn theoretical and practical courses virtually. Radiography education involves learning to position patients and operate medical imaging equipment, so it's challenging to learn online. Therefore, this study was conducted to see the impact of the pandemic on radiography education from the students' perspective. The survey was performed among UniSZA medical imaging students who have undergone theoretical learning and clinical training within the period from March 2020 to March 2022. The survey was done by distributing an online questionnaire through Google Forms. The questionnaire consists of four parts; demographic, perspective on theoretical learning during the pandemic, perspective on clinical training during the pandemic and challenges experienced in online/virtual learning. A total of 55 students participated in this study and the responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result shows the majority of the students (54.55%) agree that learning basic radiography subjects through online learning during a pandemic is hard to focus on. From the perspective of clinical training during the pandemic period, the majority of students (56.63%) worried about being infected with the Covid-19 virus as this could interrupt the clinical training sessions. The majority of the students (41.82%) experienced difficulty with internet connectivity and inadequate time for online discussion during the online learning within the pandemic period. In conclusion, the Covid-19 pandemic has highly impacted learning activities for medical imaging students at UniSZA.