Letter to the Editor Regarding “The Evolving Impact of COVID-19 on Medical Student Orthopedic Education: Perspectives From Medical Students in Different Phases of the Curriculum”

Letter to the editor

Richardson et al. recently published a paper in Geriatric Orthopaedic Surgery & Rehabilitation entitled “The Evolving Impact of COVID-19 on Medical Student Orthopedic Education: Perspectives From Medical Students in Different Phases of the Curriculum.”¹ Richardson et al. mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed medical students’ orthopedic education curriculum and provided methods that may help students seek alternative programs and supplementary learning. These are very enlightening to the practice-based orthopedic rehabilitation medical education.

During the early stage of the COVID-19 epidemic, medical colleges and universities in China also implemented similar management measures, including reducing or even stopping students’ clinical rotation and adopting network-based professional course teaching.² However, in the process of improving the teaching methods, we also found the corresponding problems.

First of all, the efficiency of online teaching and online academic lectures is challenging to be guaranteed. During the epidemic, online teaching and online academic lectures have broken the restrictions of location. Although they can effectively reduce the crowd gathering and the risk of infection, they will also greatly reduce some students’ learning efficiency with poor self-consciousness. The live broadcast software prompts students to be in a “listening state,” but they may be doing things that have nothing to do with teaching in the background and cannot be effectively supervised. In addition, some elderly teachers are not proficient in the use of teaching software, which further leads to the decline of students’ learning efficiency. During the teaching period, the department of rehabilitation medicine of our school received much negative feedback from students that the online teaching experience was inferior. This result is similar to that of Jordan, where students’ satisfaction with online teaching is very low.³

Secondly, the reduction of practical operation makes it difficult for students to adapt to clinical practice. Orthopedic sports rehabilitation is a subject that includes many clinical operations, such as joint mobilization, muscle strength exercise, and balance training.⁴ However, due to the lack of practical clinical teaching, after returning to the clinic in May, the proficiency of the current students is significantly lower than that of the previous students. We also asked students to watch the operation video repeatedly during the epidemic, and there were conditions to carry out simple action exercises between students, but the final effect was not satisfactory.

From the above problems, it is not difficult to find that the self-consciousness of students plays a key role during the epidemic.⁵ The 5 solutions mentioned by Richardson et al. also depend on students’ self-consciousness, especially in reading important professional articles. In addition, online teaching lacks the practice of various operation methods and specific quantitative standards to measure the quality of the teaching process. These problems seriously affect the learning effect of medical students and need to be further solved.