Asynchronous online learning as a key tool to adapt to new educational needs in radiology during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The risk of contagion and the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced a change in teaching methodologies in radiology. New knowledge about the disease that was being acquired on a daily basis needed to be rapidly spread worldwide, but the restrictions imposed made it difficult to share this information. This paper describes the methodology applied to design and launch a practice-based course on chest X-ray suggestive of COVID-19 right after the pandemic started, and aims to determine whether asynchronous online learning tools for radiology education are useful and acceptable to general practitioners and other medical personnel during a pandemic. The study was carried out from April to October 2020 and involved 2632 participants. Pre- and post-testing was used to assess the participants' gain of knowledge in the course content (paired t-tests and chi-squared tests of independence). A five-point Likert scale questionnaire inspired by the technological acceptance model (TAM) was provided to evaluate the e-learning methodology (ANOVA tests). The results from the pre- and post-tests showed that there were significant differences in the scores before and after completing the course (sample size = 2632, response rate = 56%, p < 0.001). As for the questionnaire, all questions surpassed 4.5 out of 5, including those referring to perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, and no significant differences were found between experienced and inexperienced participants (sample size = 2535, response rate = 53%, p = 0.85). The analysis suggests that the applied methodology is flexible enough to adapt to complex situations, and is useful to improve knowledge on the subject of the course. Furthermore, a wide acceptance of the teaching methodology is confirmed for all technological profiles, pushing for and endorsing a more widespread use of online platforms in the domain of radiology continuing education