Medical Education Online (09/06/2022) Xiberta, Pau; Boada, Imma; Thió-Henestrosa, Santiago; et al.

Researchers sought to demonstrate online learning's ability to adjust to a new situation through the design and rollout of a continuing medical education course on COVID-19 about a month after the pandemic started. The authors evaluated an interactive asynchronous e-learning course as an adaptive educational tool for COVID-19 radiological diagnosis for general practitioners and other medical personnel. The RadEd e-learning platform was used in the development of the course, which focused on chest radiology suggestive of COVID-19. A group of radiologists with more than 20 years' experience in diagnosing and teaching prepared the hour-long course, which they structured around six topics. The 2,632 participants included radiologists, non-radiologist physicians, and other healthcare providers such as medical students, residents, and technical radiologists. All questions on the questionnaire had at least 4.5 out of 5 scores, with no meaningful differences between experienced and inexperienced respondents. "By analyzing the scores of the pre- and post-tests as a whole, a statistically significant improvement was detected in the participants' knowledge, increasing the average score from a failing grade (1.44 out of 3.00, i.e., less than half of the total score) to a passing grade (1.68 out of 3.00)," the authors note. However, improvement was observed in the first and second exercises, but not in the third, due to its greater level of difficulty. "If the e-learning platform used has the minimum technological requirements and is interactive enough to engage students, then neither the performance nor the assessment of the methodology differs with respect to the technological profile of the participants," the authors conclude.

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