TY  - JOUR
AU  - Liu, Qinlai
AU  - Sun, Wenping
AU  - Du, Changqing
AU  - Yang, Leiying
AU  - Yuan, Na
AU  - Cui, Haiqing
AU  - Song, Wengang
AU  - Ge, Li
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/3/15
TI  - Medical Morphology Training Using the Xuexi Tong Platform During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development and Validation of a Web-Based Teaching Approach
JO  - JMIR Med Inform
SP  - e24497
VL  - 9
IS  - 3
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - histology and embryology
KW  - pathology
KW  - web-based teaching
KW  - Xuexi Tong platform
AB  - Background: Histology and Embryology and Pathology are two important basic medical morphology courses for studying human histological structures under healthy and pathological conditions, respectively. There is a natural succession between the two courses. At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly swept the world. During this unusual period, to ensure that medical students would understand and master basic medical knowledge and to lay a solid foundation for future medical bridge courses and professional courses, a web-based medical morphology teaching team, mainly including teachers of courses in Histology and Embryology and Pathology, was established. Objective: This study aimed to explore a new teaching mode of Histology and Embryology and Pathology courses during the COVID-19 pandemic and to illustrate its feasibility and acceptability. Methods: From March to July 2020, our team selected clinical medicine undergraduate students who started their studies in 2018 and 2019 as recipients of web-based teaching. Meanwhile, nursing undergraduate students who started their studies in 2019 and 2020 were selected for traditional offline teaching as the control group. For the web-based teaching, our team used the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to realize a new “seven-in-one” teaching method (ie, videos, materials, chapter tests, interactions,  homework, live broadcasts, and case analysis/discussion). This new teaching mode involved diverse web-based teaching methods and contents, including flipped classroom, screen-to-screen experimental teaching, a drawing competition, and a writing activity on the theme of “What I Know About COVID-19.” When the teaching was about to end, a questionnaire was administered to obtain feedback regarding the teaching performance. In the meantime, the final written pathology examination results of the web-based teaching and traditional offline teaching groups were compared to examine the mastery of knowledge of the students. Results: Using the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to conduct “seven-in-one” teaching is feasible and acceptable. With regard to the teaching performance of this new web-based teaching mode, students demonstrated a high degree of satisfaction, and the questionnaire showed that 71.3% or more of the students in different groups reported a greater degree of satisfaction or being very satisfied. In fact, more students achieved high scores (90-100) in the web-based learning group than in the offline learning control group (P=.02). Especially, the number of students with objective scores >60 in the web-based learning group was greater than that in the offline learning control group (P=.045). Conclusions: This study showed that the web-based teaching mode was not inferior to the traditional offline teaching mode for medical morphology courses, proving the feasibility and acceptability of web-based teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings lay a solid theoretical foundation for follow-up studies of medical students. 
SN  - 2291-9694
UR  - https://medinform.jmir.org/2021/3/e24497
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/24497
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33566792
DO  - 10.2196/24497
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/24497
ER  -