Managing medical curricula during the pandemic-A special collection

A few months ago, FASEB BioAdvances launched its first special collection that was designed to provide an update on trends in medical education and examine, among other things, the impact of the pandemic on them.1 These articles consider many facets of the teaching enterprise, such as technological development, the importance of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions, and competency-based, time-independent learning, that have been the subject of on-going discussions for many years. Of course, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has abruptly disrupted all teaching activities at every level from kindergarten to professional schools, along with about every other aspect of society function, and medical education is no exception. In the absence of an effective vaccine or therapeutic, infections can only be significantly controlled by regulating social contact through distancing and proper facial protections, which meant that instruction, on a face-to-face basis, that has been the principal mechanism of teaching for centuries, had to be modified and on very short notice. The first collection has explored (and continues to do so) facets of the these pandemic-driven changes on medical training in the context of the broader trends in medical education that were already ongoing and will continue after the pandemic is eliminated as a material effector. As the guest editors of the first collection noted,1 “a kaleidoscope of old and new strategies and resources, many technology-based” have already been introduced, somewhat tentatively in the spring of this year and more completely with the start of the new academic year. As they also said, “differences in geographical, social and cultural traditions likely will require diverse approaches and a range of individualized solutions.” Thus, it is the purpose of this second collection entitled “Managing Medical Curricula during the Pandemic” to examine in a more detailed manner some of these individual approaches in a number of US medical schools, with the view of assessing “what works and what doesn't.” To do this in a meaningful way, we will invite all of the participating institutions to provide a follow up article a year hence that analyzes the changes and methods introduced, which clearly will heavily feature various aspects of virtual technology, and to indicate what they expect to retain and what will likely not be used further. As such, we believe these reports, individually and as a whole, will become a case study that will be valuable to medical educators everywhere. The articles that have been invited reflect a cross section of both public and private schools of medicine and represent diverse geographic areas with varying severity and timing of the COVID-19 impact so as to allow for different emphases and missions. However, clearly this will not cover every approach or innovation that has been or will be introduced. In this regard, the Special Collection mechanism of the journal is open-ended and allows for the addition of new material to be posted indefinitely. Institutions interested in joining in this exercise should contact one of the guest editors for further particulars. The reports will cover a number of aspects of the curriculum from individual department teaching programs to school wide responses in both basic science and clinical aspects of the curricula. Some of the approaches will be quite similar, while others are significantly unique. It is interesting to note that the pandemic, and the changes it has necessitated, comes at a time when there has already been a fair amount of deliberation about medical training, as well as concomitant adjustments, and some of what is documented had its origins in pre-pandemic planning. The articles in the first Special Collection1 provide considerable insight in this regard. Perhaps the major effect of the onset of COVID-19 has been to synchronize these efforts as everyone was put in a “must respond” situation and everyone is now investing in curriculum assessment at more or less the same level of intensity at the same time. It is therefore appropriate to ask the question: is the result of this sweeping “tsunami” induction event going to produce more permanent changes (because everyone will have some sort of experience with the “new” methods introduced) or will pandemic control by vaccine, herd immunity, effective therapeutics, and so on, allows institutions to backslide to teaching mechanisms/content that have been used for years, even centuries? Thus, it should be valuable to explore why certain changes stick and others do not. Since it is already the topic of much discussion how the practice of doing science or medicine will be impacted by changes caused by the pandemic, it seems a reasonable question to ask as to how the teaching of these disciplines will be similarly affected. The two special collections on medical education that FASEB BioAdvances is hosting are intended to complement each other with this special collection taking a more general view of the pandemic's impact on medical education and medical curricula, whereas the first special collection has a few examples how the pandemic has not only changed specific aspects of biomedical education, but also addresses other non-pandemic changes.