. Tushar Aditya Narain; . Ankur Mittal; . Vanya Singh; . Vikas Kumar Panwar
Volume 11, Issue 3 , March 2021, , Pages 1-6
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The COVID‑19 disease has resulted in an almost complete shutdown of all servicesworldwide. Hospitals continued to provide emergency services and treatment for COVID‑19 ...
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BACKGROUND: The COVID‑19 disease has resulted in an almost complete shutdown of all servicesworldwide. Hospitals continued to provide emergency services and treatment for COVID‑19 disease.Teaching hospitals like ours had another responsibility at hand; training of our surgical residents.Not allowing this pandemic to take away months of training, we resorted to online virtual trainingprograms, for continuing academic activities. After having conducted thirty such sessions, we tookfeedback from the participating students and faculty members to evaluate the usefulness of this newinitiative and identify the lacunae that needed to be addressed.MATERIALS AND METHODS: The initial twenty classes were held on the GoTo Meeting ® onlineplatform, whereas the last ten were conducted using the Google Meet application. A 20‑itemquestionnaire covering four broad domains of general perception, feasibility, knowledge gained, anddrawbacks was circulated, and 19 responses were registered anonymously. Strength, weakness,opportunity, and threat analysis was done based on the responses received.RESULTS: About 89.5% of the participants believed that online classes were the ideal platform forcontinuing education and 84.2% of the participants were overall satisfied with the whole exercise. TheAchilles’ heel was the availability of a good Internet connection, and the major lacunae were the poorquality of video and audio transmission. Seventy‑four percent of the participants wanted to continueonline training in the future too, whereas 26% wanted to revert to the traditional face‑to‑face teaching.CONCLUSION: Online virtual training classes are an effective and feasible alternative to traditionalteaching in times such as these, which demanded strict social distancing. It naturally lacked thewarmth and personal touch of the traditional teaching classes, but it allowed us to continue teachingour residents and also prepare them to face the biggest menace of all times.
