Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Distance Learning Framework to Expedite Medical Education during COVID-19 pandemic: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced medical schools to suspend on-campus live-sessions and shift to distance-learning (DL). This precipitous shift presented medical educators with a challenge, 'to create a "" of the learning environment that students experience in classroom, in DL'. This requires the design of an adaptable and versatile DL-framework bearing in mind the theoretical underpinnings associated with DL.

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Distance Learning Framework to Adapt to the Changing Landscape of Anatomy Instruction in Medical Education During COVID-19 Pandemic: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

This study presents the design of a DL-framework to deliver anatomy teaching that provides a microfiche of the onsite anatomy learning experience during the mandated COVID-19 lockdown. First, using nominal-group technique, we identified the DL learning theories to be employed in blueprinting the DL-framework. Effectiveness of the designed DL-framework in anatomy teaching was demonstrated using the exemplar of the Head and Neck (H&N) course during COVID-19 lockdown, in the pre-clerkship curriculum at our medical school.