Abstract
Background The COVID19 pandemic brought many challenges, including delivering interactive courses such as the Mindful Medical Practice (MMP) program to medical students. It also provided opportunities to trial online teaching of the program using technologies such as Zoom. Approach Medical educators from McGill University in Montreal and The Rural Clinical School of Western Australia in Busselton collaborated via Zoom to adapt the MMP program to an online format. This involved weekly meetings to adapt each class and debrief following its delivery. A number of adaptations were required which were implemented with ease while maintaining the program’s integrity. Evaluation The facilitator found the course relatively straightforward to teach with Zoom. In their essays at the end of the coursethe students reported that the MMP program was a valuable experience that they found to be “enjoyable”, “positive”, “interesting”, “beneficial” and “refreshing”. They reported that the online experience offered benefits over face-to-face delivery and was particularly helpful during the COVID19 pandemic. Reflection There were a number of potential limitations: this was a relatively small group of students; the students were already well acquainted with the facilitator; the students and the facilitator were experienced in using Zoom for teaching. The major strength was a clear demonstration of the feasibility of delivering the entire program online that is particularly relevant during this time of stress and uncertainty and also expands the potential to provide this teaching to students and universities across the world.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, including delivering interactive courses such as the Mindful Medical Practice (MMP) program to medical students
Evaluation: The facilitator found the course relatively straightforward to teach with Zoom. In their essays at the end of the course the students reported that the MMP program was a valuable experience that they found to be “enjoyable”, “positive”, “interesting”, “beneficial” and “refreshing”. They reported that the online experience offered benefits over face-to-face delivery and was helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic
With the advent of social distancing to address the COVID-19 pandemic we and other medical educators were faced with the challenge of how to continue to train medical students in the skills, attitudes and ways of being that would prepare them for their clinical work with patients [1]
Summary
It was suggested to teach a modified version of the course that relied on giving students reading and reflective writing assignments followed by brief discussions online These are feasible approaches, some of which may be implemented, we believed that we would be missing an opportunity to use the crisis of the pandemic [5] to enlarge the scope and impact [6] of our teaching if we did not explore whether and how the course could be taught effectively using technology (e.g. Zoom) to connect students and faculty in a live recreation of the in-person course. There were several adaptations that were required in order to deliver the program via the online Zoom platform These included using breakout rooms for sharing in dyads; sharing images and videos using the “share screen” function; using the “whiteboard” function to write lists and notes; and acting out and role playing the Satir stances. For more detailed information regarding alterations for each class, please refer to the supplement
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