Teletraining: An Assessment of the Use Case of Remote Learning for Clinical Knowledge Acquisition
Abstract
Introduction:
The advancement of technology has made remote learning or teletraining an indispensable tool in the medical education space. This is especially true in the aftermath of the COVID 19 pandemic, during which most, if not all educational instruction was delivered remotely. However, as the popularity of remote learning continues to grow, it becomes increasingly more important to assess the quality and efficacy of this form of training, especially in comparison to more conventional methods (i.e., live, in- person learning). With that in mind, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the acquired competency of a group of medical students after they received instruction via teletraining in order to make a stronger case for the implementation of this learning modality.
Methods:
An educational video depicting experimental seizures in lab mice was created at Eastern Virginia Medical School and delivered to a group of six medical students at the Catholic University of Cuyo, San Luis, Argentina. Then, a training session led by the principal investigator describing the different types of experimental seizures and their associated scores on the Racine scale was also given to the medical students. These students had no prior experience with identifying the different types of experimental seizures contained in the video. The students independently evaluated the 16:41 minute video and assigned time frames to each type of seizure according to the Racine scale. This evaluation process was performed once a week over the course of three weeks for a total of three times. Descriptive statistical analysis was then performed on the collected data and agreement was assessed by an Interclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC).
Results:
Intra-observer agreement for all evaluators between the three review sessions ranged from 0.85-0.97 (ICC). Inter-observer agreement analysis of the evaluators ranged between 0.80-0.90. When further broken down into the different scores on the Racine scale, the inter-observer agreement for scores 1 to 4 ranged from -0.15 to -0.18, and 0.16 for score 5 (p=<0.0001). The observer scores were also compared with the original curve score sent from EVMS, observing a high correlation (rho ranging from 0.88 - 0.91).
Conclusion:
This study provides insight into the effectiveness of teletraining as a learning modality and the potential for it to be used as a tool for the development of clinical competency in medical students. Moreover, the results from this study can provide valuable information to educators and organizations in the medical education space looking to implement teletraining in an efficacious manner. If used properly, teletraining can allow for deeper learning in live, in-person environments by establishing a baseline level of knowledge in learners before they gather for in-person didactic sessions.