Online teaching in medical training: Establishing good online teaching practices from cumulative experience

Online teaching has the potential to transcend geographical boundaries, is flexible, learner centered and can help students develop self-directed learning skills. The recently introduced competency-based curriculum has also advocated e-learning as an indispensable tool for self-directed learning. For effective online learning, good online teaching practices should be adopted. These include alignment of online teaching and learning with delivery of curriculum and objectives, synchronous, and asynchronous interaction between teacher and student, encouraging the development of higher-order thinking skills, active learning, and self-directed learning in students. In addition, good online teaching practices should have an inbuilt component of feedback and provide for effective time management, respect for diverse talents and ways of learning with continuous monitoring and mentoring of the learners. Online assessments, both formative and summative should also aim to ensure student involvement in the process. Capacity building of faculty through faculty development programs for the development of specific competencies such as social competency, pedagogical competency, managerial competency, and technical competency in the times of COVID-19 is now recognized as the need of the hour. Although online teaching and learning in medical education is new, it has the potential to become mainstream in future.