Play Your Way to an "A": Helping Students Engage During the Social Isolation of Remote Learning

One hurdle that educators are presented with is that the classroom is no longer limited to a physical location but rather students and professor can meet via the internet and, before COVID19, distance or remote learning was something that students, by and large, had the option of choosing in which whether to engage. Students had the option to take "online courses", whether those be synchronous remote learning or asynchronous online courses. Indeed, numerous studies have focused on investigating the efficacy of many different approaches to distance and online learning. Unfortunately, COVID 19 mandated a rapid transition to remote learning and with this forced change has come what some students describe as "Zoom Fatigue"[1]. Many students reported feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and disengaged by the dramatic increase in mandated distance education required by the COVID pandemic. Video conferencing has become the "go to" panacea for education during this time and students are spending unprecedented amounts of time in front of a screen where normally they would be in a classroom. This heretofore singular and unique approach to education coupled with decreased peer-to-peer interaction has caused a problem with student engagement [2]. Students engagement and performance have decreased during COVID 19 due to forced online learning and lack of peer interaction. We hypothesize that creating a non-graded, fun, and relaxing physiology-focused trivia night will increase student engagement and performance on summative assessments. Introduce a voluntary "Trivia Night" review session to increase interaction amongst peers and review respiratory physiology material.