A practice and exploration of blended learning in medical morphology during the post-COVID-19 pandemic era

Since 2021, the prevention and control of the coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic has been normalized. However, considering the high density of students and the potential for epidemic relapse, our medical morphological teaching team established a novel blended learning mode with mainly offline teaching in the general sections and blend learning in systematic sections. Specifically, this study sought to improve the teaching quality of the two courses of "Histology and Embryology" and "Pathology", and lay a solid foundation for clinical medical undergraduates to learn medical courses well in the future.

In the Spring 2021 semester, two classes from the Class of 2019 and two classes from the Class of 2020 were randomly selected as the intervention groups, to carry out blended learning of "Histology and Embryology", and "Pathology", respectively. Meanwhile, four parallel classes were randomly selected as control groups to carry out completely traditional offline teaching. The blended learning was based on outcome-based education concepts and used small private online courses from the "Xuexi Tong" (Century Superstar Information Technology Development Co., Ltd., Beijing) platform. In the theory class, case-based learning following a self-designed P-C-P-E-S-E (Pre-class-Case-Problem-Expansion-Summary-Expansion) teaching sequence was implemented. In the experimental class, a virtual digital platform with flipped classroom learning was integrated.

Both teaching satisfaction and students' scores were found to be significantly greater in the intervention group than in the control group. Furthermore, the intervention group also effectively surpassed the control group in terms of students' comprehensive abilities such as drawing, scientific research, participating in competitions, forensic case analysis, and so on.

Our novel blended learning approach strengthened the communication between teachers and students, obviously improved students' self-directed learning abilities, and finally achieved the purpose of improving the comprehensive abilities of students. This mode is suited for the post-epidemic era and future variable environments. It also has substantial promotional instructive modeling value.

Not applicable.