A virtual ‘hour on-call’: creating a novel teaching programme for final-year undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic

Historically, undergraduate medical education curricula have consisted of a mixture of lecture-based teaching, problem-based learning (PBL) and, more recently, in situ simulation. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to the suspension of much of the teaching carried out using these traditional methods due to social distancing requirements and self-isolation.1 Although distance learning is not a new modality, the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the development of unique, safe and effective teaching programmes using emergent technology, such as Zoom and MS Teams. There is evidence that distance learning via videoconferencing has equivalence to face-to-face learning.2 We discuss the results …