Asynchronous versus Traditional Teaching for MBBS Undergraduate Students-Effectiveness and Students Perspectives - A Pilot Study.

Background: Traditional lectures continue to be one of the common ways of teaching practiced in medical schools across India. However, there are many other effective ways of teaching in large groups and lately e-learning modules, which can be synchronous, asynchronous, or blended, have been used to complement face-to-face interactions. E-assignments have been effectively used to engage students into meaningful learning.

Aim: The aim of the study is to compare asynchronous teaching with traditional teaching in terms of student perspectives and learning.

Materials and Methods: After taking ethical clearance from the Institutional Ethics Committee, the study was conducted involving 66 student volunteers from MBBS 2nd year. All the students were subjected to a pretest on the topic - "low backache" prior to the intervention. The students were then divided into two groups: Group A and Group B of 33 students each. Group A was taught by traditional lecture method, while Group B was given an e-assignment on the topic for which no face-to-face interaction was done earlier. The students from both the groups were then subjected to a posttest followed by feedback.

Results: Analysis of covariance, considering the pretest score as a covariate, revealed that the two groups were comparable to begin with P = 0.632. After the intervention, posttest mean scores improved significantly ( P < 0.001) within each group, for both the groups, but there was no significant difference in posttest scores on intergroup comparison ( P = 0.507). Student feedback brought to light that 85% of the students felt that the traditional lecture method followed by e-learning would be of a great benefit to them.

Conclusion: Although no single method emerged as superior over the other, student feedback revealed that 90% of the students graded e-module as either satisfactory to good. Most felt that lecture followed by e-modules will help them to learn better.