Education During COVID 19 Outbreak: College of Pharmacy Experience (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED In response to the announcement of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, a worldwide closure of schools and educational institutions has been implemented to combat the spread of the disease. This has resulted in transferring from face-to-face teaching to virtual schooling and e-learning to continue the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020. The main objective of this article is to review and reflect on the experience of the College of Pharmacy at King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences in implementing action plans concerning applying e-learning in the delivery of the remaining curriculum and assessment methods after the announcement of COVID-19 pandemic. The feedback of the students was surveyed to address issues of preparedness, attitude and barriers concerning e-learning. Action plans were implemented at the university and the college levels. The educational process went very smooth by e-learning and several assessment methods have been applied in continuous assessment and final examinations. A total of 170 contact hours have been delivered by live broadcasting whereas 125 contact hours were recorded. Minimal number of lectures and topic discussion sessions have been deleted and some have been transferred to the next semester. The survey results indicated good satisfaction of the students in the e-learning process were approximately 75% of them have responded to a survey that was prepared for this purpose. This experience could provide a helpful guidance and insight to deal with such a crisis to rapidly move from regular educational activities by face-to-face teaching to e-learning.