Technological and Ethical Challenges of Online Education: Adapting Medical Education to Digital Platforms

Defining Best Practices In Medical Education

The increase in OLEs and online education has emphasized a need for devising novel metrics for learning outcomes and assessing whether the inclusion of OLEs and online classes, in fact, increases student achievements. Existing efforts have often been strongly biased by individuals’ preconceptions on the effectiveness of OLEs. For example, in a study surveying the opinions of almost 3,000 chief academic officers of colleges, there was a strong positive association between the belief that students learn more in online classes and the extent of which the college was committed to online learning (Allen & Seaman, 2013).

Some of the earliest research on the topic of distance learning pointed out the challenges of accurately assessing educational outcomes. While most studies utilize three metrics to assess effectiveness, i.e. student grades, attitudes and overall student satisfaction, it is important to be aware of the inherent shortcomings of such research (Phipps & Merisotis, 1999; Moore & Thompson, 1990; Ni, 2013). Weak experimental designs, inappropriate statistics, lack of randomization, and an ensuing inability to distinguish cause and effect remain flaws of many studies that have been published on the assessment of online learning effectiveness (Phipps and Merisotis, 1999; McWilliam & Lee, 2006; Ni, 2013).