Adapting to Major Disruptions to the Learning Environment: Strategies and Lessons Learnt During a Global Pandemic

Dealing with rapid, unanticipated disruptions to established learning environments are challenging. There are a number of situations that may require this including natural disasters such as weather disturbance, viral pandemics, or political unrest and violence. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic provided medical educators with this challenge and enabled valuable lessons to be learnt. These can be utilized to prepare for other occurrences in which disruptions must be faced and high-quality education delivered. Focus should be placed both on successful transition of learning events to a new modality appropriate to the emerging climate and on reliably assessing efficacy of these new educational strategies with identification of those best suited to the new environment. We present a framework, based on local lessons learnt, by which the challenges faced during an educational disruption can be addressed, and describe methods to determine which changes are most effective and should be durable.