Suneetha Bollipo1, John G. Wilson2, Phani Madhavi Kajana3, Akhil Jakkala4
BACKGROUND
Coronavirus pandemic ever since its beginning has impacted all aspects of human
life. Its impact on education was more evident as all schools, colleges had to be
shut down. However, Covid-19 has forced educational institutions to search for
new modes of teaching. Every school and college was forced to adopt the digital
medium of education or e learning. Following the preventive measures of social
distancing, all conventional classroom classes were suspended due to the ongoing
Covid-19 pandemic. Considering the prevailing lockdown imposed by the
government and the necessary physical distancing, an online teaching session was
conducted everywhere in all the medical colleges. We used a free version of Zoom
for teaching classes for medical students. Students’ perceptions were collected at
the end of the lecture series. We wanted to understand and analyse the perception
of medical students regarding e-classes, to collect feedback for further
improvement of e-classes and optimum utilisation of online platform for
undergraduate medical students and to assesses the perceptions of medical
students towards e-learning during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
METHODS
A cross-sectional study was conducted at AC Subba Reddy Medical College,
Nellore, in the month of September 2020 among 476 medical students of all the
professional years. A pretested self-administered questionnaire was used to
conduct the study. After taking verbal consent over telephone, data was collected
from questionnaire sent through Google Forms. Students were asked to read each
choice carefully and choose the response which best expresses his / her feelings.
SPSS version 23 was used for data analysis.
RESULTS
A total of 476 students’ responses was received; 137 were males and 245 were
females. Around 3 / 4th were (77 %) having negative perception towards elearning.
Almost 3 / 4th (76 %) of the students used smartphone for e-learning.
CONCLUSIONS
Overall, the students felt that e-learning is not at par with conventional classroom
learning but felt it to be an extremely useful mode of learning during the period
of Covid-19 pandemic.
