Attitude, Ethics, and Communication module for medical undergraduates: rapid transition to online mode of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: Imparting skills related to attitudes, ethics and communication (AETCOM) is as important as psychomotor and cognitive skills in medical education. During the COVID-19 pandemic with the physical shut-down of medical colleges, alternatives to in-person teaching of AETCOM competencies were explored. Here we describe our experience of conducting online AETCOM sessions for medical undergraduates.

Methodology: An online teaching/learning schedule was developed for the topic “working in a health care team” for AETCOM sessions in the Community Medicine department in a medical college in North India. A series of brainstorming sessions among departmental faculty members were followed by mapping of available resources. Postgraduate students of the department were involved as facilitators. Feedback from students was obtained.

Results: The developed schedule was implemented with 169 students of the phase II undergraduate course. The schedule was based on synchronous sharing of open source online videos such as movies, or role plays followed by small group discussion sessions which were facilitated by a teacher. Narrative writing, a short-answer type questionnaire, followed by another round of discussion was used to promote critical thinking. The students mentioned the selected videos, the structure of the online questionnaire for submission of narratives and discussion sessions which were participatory and voluntary in nature helped them to understand the scheduled topic.

Conclusion: Carefully developed structured strategies based on triggers such as videos can serve as a possible alternative to teach AETCOM competencies in case of shutdown of in person teaching in medical colleges.