ABSTRACT
Introduction: In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic required the UA RKKCOP Self-Care Therapeutics course, taught traditionally as an oncampus flipped classroom design, to be offered as an online course. Research Question or Hypothesis: Student performance on exams will be similar regardless of students attending a flipped classroom on campus versus online, via web-conferencing. Study Design: Retrospective comparison between an on-campus and online flipped classroom Self Care Therapeutics course. Methods: Exam performance was compared for the 2019 in-person attending cohort and the 2020 online attending cohort. Course design was similar between the two cohorts, with each completing assigned pre-reading, an associated quiz, in-class small group discussions and inclass large group faculty-led debrief. For small group discussions, the oncampus cohort selected their own group members while the online cohort was randomly placed into different groups for each class. Three examinations were administered consisting of 33 multiple choice questions. Descriptive statistics and a two tailed Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare student performance between the on-campus and online attendance cohorts. A significance level of 0.05 was used. Results: There were 243 students included in the analysis (58% female, 42% male). Minimal differences between the exam averages were observed for all 3 exams with statistically significant differences observed in performance for exam 1 only (exam 1 = 0.04±0.11, p=0.02;exam 2 = 0.03±0.09, p=0.11;exam 3 = 0±0.09, p=0.95). The correlation in scores between different exams appeared the same for both years. There was a moderate positive correlation between scores on exams 1, 2, and 3. Conclusion: Based on examination results, content in a flipped classroom design may have been as effectively delivered online as it was in person. Further research using data from multiple courses or from the same cohort, randomized, is needed to improve the external validity of these findings.