Medical education behind the screens: the context of COVID-19 pandemic and remote teaching

Abstract

In Brazil, social isolation measures to combat the advance of COVID-19 demanded the suspension of face-to-face activities at medical schools. With the small number of studies that analyze the pedagogical practices used in this period, this article seeks to investigate, through a literature review, the main methodologies found, as well as their consequences for the academic community. Data were collected from the Scielo, Pubmed and Virtual Health Library (BVS) databases with the inclusion of works published from April 2020 to December 2021. Based on the content of the selected texts, four categories were created to be considered . After analysis, it made clear that remote teaching brought several negative consequences for the teaching and learning process. Aspects such as the expansion of difficulties in accessing education found by low-income students, slowness in offering aid, in addition to the lack of support for the mental health of teachers and students, underpinned points widely debated in the studies. As for the new methodologies, it was noticed that their main focus was to mitigate the absence of face-to-face activities. While the mechanisms that helped in teacher-student relationships were mostly satisfactory, the quality of teaching was understood to be below that offered by the traditional methodology.