Table 1.

General Benefits and Drawbacks to Remote Versus In‐Person Learning

Benefits	Drawbacks
Reduced risk of infection	Decreased human interaction
Elimination of commute time and transportation expenses	Loss of nonverbal cues (body language)
Increased access to participants and larger audiences, including the development of virtual rotations	Decreased opportunities to communicate (fear of interruption; muting; poor audio connection)
Increased opportunities to communicate (eg, chat box)	Increased distractions a
Ease of joining and leaving sessions	Traditional methods of engagement do not translate
Reduced anxiety	Difficulty in assessing participant engagement
Decreased distractions a	Possible security issues with protected health information
Small areas of interest may be easier to show (digital zoom; annotation options)	Generally worse image quality
All participants view the same field orientation	Latency in focusing field and z‐axis
Attendance can be easily tracked	Greater variation among presenters, based on comfort with technology and quality of technical setup
	Additional cost to maintain modern hardware, software, cameras, and quality network connection

^a Distractions may vary depending on individual environments.