The offline-to-online shift of medical education during COVID-19 pandemic: A mixed method study of medical teachers and students from India (preprint)

Introduction: Most institutes worldwide have experienced a forced shift to online mode education during COVID 19 pandemic. As in Indian Medical Institutions e-learning is not a well-established mode of teaching, it disrupts the newly implemented competency based medical education (CBME). This sudden shift in educational methods introduced new experiences, opportunities, and difficulties among medical teachers and students. In this study we explore undergraduate medical students and teachers’ perception, detailed insights and learning experience on online medical education. Method: This is an institution based mixed methods study conducted at three medical institutes in India. A self-prepared semi structured questionnaire was applied to extract various prospective of teaching and assessment through online mode. Qualitative descriptive design was applied using focused group discussion. All FGDs were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic content analysis to identify themes and subthemes regarding perceptions of online and offline education. Result: A total of 323 medical students out of 510 and 35 medical teachers out of 71 were included in the study. Most students and teachers agreed to the fact that they faced technical difficulties, perceived less connected, and felt difficulty in achieving desired competencies. In qualitative analysis five major themes (Learning Environment, Technology, Competency, Health issues, Assessment) and multiple subthemes were identified. Conclusion: Improvement of the online teaching methods with appropriate technical advancement may help to reduce the gap between the online and offline teaching learning modalities.

Impact of Nonpharmacological Public Health Interventions on Epidemiological Parameters of COVID-19 Pandemic in India (preprint)

Public health interventions are epidemiologically sound cost-effective methods to control the disease burden. Non-pharmacological Interventions are the only mode to control the disease in the absence of medications. To find the impact interventions on the epidemiological indicators of disease progression. This is a secondary data analysis done on COVID-19 data. Median Doubling Time and R0 were calculated for a rolling period of seven days. Interventions were scored from zero to three with the increasing level of stringency. Multivariate linear regression was performed to find the role of individual interventions on R0 and Median Doubling Time. The highest intervention score was reported in the lockdown phase which gradually decreased to lowest level of 22. R0 values settled to a level of 1.25 and the median doubling time increased to 20 days at the end of the study. Public awareness and public health laws were found to be related to both R0 and median doubling time in the Pre-lockdown phase only. Implementation of interventions at the ground level is one of the key factors of the success of PHI. Post implementation poor effectiveness of many interventions is evident from the study. Further studies related to the sequence of interventions is required to further analyse the poor effect of interventions.