Perception of undergraduate students towards online teaching during COVID-19 pandemic in a medical college in Hyderabad, India

Abstract

Background: The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected medical education and clinical training and forced medical schools to switch over to online teaching. To assess the success of online learning, knowing students' perceptions is an important criterion. The present study evaluated the students' insight toward online teaching and learning. Aim of the current study was to evaluate the students' perspective toward online teaching through an online questionnaire in the challenging time of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Objective of the study was to assess students' perception of online teaching and barriers faced by them. Methods: This institutional-based cross-sectional study was conducted between 1 September to 30 September 2021 at medical college, Hyderabad. Out of 600 students of MBBS 1 to 4 year, 329 agreed to participate. They were given an online questionnaire that included the Dundee ready education environment measure, to assess students' perception of the educational environment. A part of it was used, i.e., SPL (students' perception of learning) domain, to assess the student’s perception. Results: Overall score of perception of online teaching-learning according to the SPL domain was 23.41±4.61, which was less than the optimal score of 25, which indicated many problems in this method of online teaching-learning. 67.5% preferred face-to-face teaching to online teaching. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically affected traditional teaching-learning methods, and online teaching has emerged as a boon to continue the learning process. However, many students faced many obstacles adapting to this new learning model. Hence, the offline mode of teaching was preferred over the online mode.