Climate of Online e-Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic in a Saudi Medical School: Students’ Perspective

INTRODUCTION The circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown offered an opportunity to develop remote educational strategies in medical education. OBJECTIVES To assess medical students’ experiences with online e-learning (OeL) satisfaction, intellectual environment, and communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted at the College of Medicine, University of Bisha, Saudi Arabia. A self-administered questionnaire (21 items) was used to evaluate OeL in three domains of satisfaction (nine items), intellectual environment (seven items), and communication (five items). Students from years one to six were invited to fill out the questionnaire form with five-point Likert scale responses. Descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and independent t-test were used to evaluate the association between variables. RESULTS Out of 237 participants, 96.6% (158 male and 71 female) responded to the questionnaire. Most students (86.5%) preferred the blackboard for their e-learning. The mean total scores were 30.18 ± 6.9 out of 45 for satisfaction, 19.67 ± 5.4 out of 25 for communication 25.43 ± 5.1 out of 35 for the intellectual environment. Over 50% of the students rated moderate scores on satisfaction and intellectual environment domains. About 85% of the students rated moderate scores in the communication domain. Male students rated higher significant scores than female students for satisfaction (31.3 ± 6.3 vs 27.6 ± 7; P