Have you found yourself wishing your virtual teaching was more PEACEful? In this blog post, we draw on two theoretical frameworks – Cognitive Load Theory and Self Determination Theory – to outline five key steps for improving your virtual teaching. Together with my colleagues Dr. Deepa Rangachari and Dr. Jeremy Cetnar, we generated a useful mnemonic for these key principles of virtual teaching: PEACE.

This post was inspired by a recent assignment I completed as part of the Harvard Macy Program for Educators in the Health Professions. We were asked to write about a “silver lining” that transpired from the COVID-19 pandemic. I struggled with thinking of something positive when I was surrounded by so much loss, including parents of my patients struggling with employment and food insecurity, and even death. However, I challenged myself to recognize my privilege and, in my reflection, I was able to consider how my professional life had actually improved in a very noticeable way.

Amid all of the pandemic’s tragedies, our medical students’ education could not be another sacrifice.  Before COVID-19, our third year medical student clerks spent four days a week seeing patients at their family medicine preceptors’ offices, and then gathered back in the classroom on Fridays for a robust didactic curriculum. It was a day both to review core topics and to get together as a group with breakfast and lunch, the latter a not-so-hidden feature of the program intending to alleviate some of the inherent loneliness of a non-hospital-based rotation comprising one student intensely working with one preceptor.

Alas, COVID-19 hit. After a spring hiatus, masked students returned to their clinical duties, but all in-person classroom programming was suspended. Enter virtual learning!

In the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all teaching and learning has gone online. The protective benefits of this scenario are that it facilitates in the continuation of education via distance or blended learning in safer, more socially distant environments. However, it has created a stressful situation for some health professions educators, whose personal and work lives are now a blur causing “techno stress” and burnout. Constantly interacting through a box on your screen is not ideal for medical professionals, and we have done much improvisation in our teaching practices. This blog post discusses instructional strategies which would help teachers combat frustrations created by online sessions.

Although many of us will reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic as disruptive to our way of life, COVID-19 has radically transformed the process of medical education and has served as a catalyst for incorporation of new technologies, remote learning platforms, and novel methods of instruction. These changes have placed faculty development at the forefront of the medical education response to COVID-19. Faculty developers provided continual and responsible support during this “emergency online education pivot” as institutions minimized the catastrophic spread of disease and by changing the traditional medical education approach. Faculty developers, as experts in online learning pedagogy, educational technology tools, and online student services, designed, produced, and delivered training quickly and effectively to meet the immediate needs of faculty and to save institutions.