The Teaching of the Infectology Subject in the Degree - Two Years of Virtual Experience

Abstract

Distance education is a teaching modality with its own characteristics associated with the creation of a particular space to generate, promote and implement situations in which the teaching-learning process takes place.

Distance or remote teaching has two pillars on which it is based: synchrony and asynchrony. In the synchronous stage, students participate in a live class, through a virtual environment that allows them to share the space with the teacher and other students, respecting specific days and times. Digital asynchrony, on the other hand, will allow that student to approach content on demand, that is, they will be able to interact with the content at their own pace. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the implementation of preventive isolation as a public health measure and with this, new challenges are presented for higher education institutions and especially for careers with high classroom content. To evaluate the impact on the students of the Infectology subject in the Medicine career of the University of Buenos Aires, we analyze the last four years of studying the subject. In virtuality, we observe an impossibility of sustaining the didactic pedagogical standard of face-to-face teaching. This teaching modality conditioned the contents and objectives of the subject.

In the pandemic, we also observed a decrease in the number of students enrolled in the final evaluation, a phenomenon that has not been fully clarified, and at the same time, an increase in the percentage of failed students, probably associated with the lack of practical activities in the classroom.