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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a significant challenge to education systems worldwide, disrupting traditional teaching and learning methods. This study aims to explore the perceptions of medical students at Abadan University of Medical Sciences regarding electronic assessment methods during the pandemic. Methods: This qualitative study utilized conventional content analysis and involved medical students in their second semester of 2021 who had chosen a unit during the pandemic. Results: Through the analysis process, the participants' experiences were categorized into six main classes, which included the following: information technology infrastructure, teaching methods of teachers, design of virtual exam questions, monitoring of online exams, psychological issues, and types of virtual assessment. Conclusion: The medical students shared their experiences with virtual assessment during the pandemic, highlighting challenges related to internet infrastructure, communication issues between teachers and students, exam monitoring, psychological factors, reduced learning efficiency due to virtual summative assessment alone, and better learning efficiency through formative assessment alongside summative assessment. They also suggested improvements to online exams, such as increasing the number of questions on each page, allowing the possibility to return to previous questions, and ensuring non-randomness in clinical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The alarming outbreak of the COVID-19 virus significantly disrupted all aspects of human life, including education. As a result, e-learning has become a vital tool for education. This study aimed to investigate the attitudes of medical and anesthesia students toward e-learning in physiology during the pandemic of COVID-19. Methods: This descriptive study was conducted among 67 medical and anesthesiology students at Abadan University of Medical Sciences who studied physiology in the second semester of 2020-2021 in the form of e-learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A researcher-created questionnaire was used, rating items on a five-point Likert scale. Data were entered into SPSS 21 for statistical analysis and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: A total of 73.1% of the participants in this study were women. The favorable opinions of students by percentage were as follows: satisfactory access to the Internet, 71.0%; the possibility of downloading educational content from the educational system, 88.2%; effective communication between teacher and student through e-learning, 20.6%; e-learning by combining online and offline education, 69.1%; the suitability of offline educational content due to accessibility convenient to learn at any time and place where the student wants to learn, 75%; face-to-face education is more suitable than e-learning, 60.3%. Conclusion: Effective communication between teacher and student is weak in virtual/online education. Students were generally positive about a combination of online and offline virtual education together and liked offline educational content due to ease of access at any time and place. In general, students preferred face-to-face teaching to virtual education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Universities have switched to virtual assessments due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the satisfaction level of medical students at the Abadan University of Medical Sciences (AUMS) with the virtual assessment methods of the cardiac physiology course. Methods: This study was conducted on 42 medical students of AUMS who were in the second semester of 2020 - 2021 (COVID-19 pandemic) and participated in the cardiac physiology course. Researchers developed an online questionnaire with 17 questions about students' satisfaction with assessment methods. Data were collected and organized in SPSS Software Version 21 for descriptive statistical analysis. Results: The mean age of the participants was 21.4 ± 2.08 years, of whom 76.2% (32) agreed that a higher percentage of the score should relate to the virtual formative assessmentand78.6% (33) experiencedmorestress in virtual summative assessmentcompared to the formative method. About 93.6% (39) agreed that all virtual summative assessment questions should be multiple-choice, and 88.4% (37) believed that allocating 1 to 2 minutes for each multiple-choice summative assessment question lowers their stress levels. Conclusions: According to the results, the virtual formative assessment had an accepted place in the cardiac physiology course and helped students reduce stress and learn more. The students preferred summative assessment questions to be multiple-choice due to the difficulty of the cardiac physiology course. More research should be conducted on this subject with a larger sample size in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]