Staying The Course

HKUMed provides a world-class education for our students, which has been invigorated in recent years with initiatives to meet the demands of 21st century medicine and healthcare, such as interprofessional training, use of new technologies and programmes to deepen students’ appreciation of the person behind the disease. Fortuitously, some of these efforts have helped us to deal with the disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Most of our teaching programmes are based on face-to-face contact, whether in the classroom, laboratory bench or hospital bedside. Much of this became impossible when the pandemic took hold, yet we had already been building experience with online and virtual learning. In the autumn semester of 2019, we began experimenting quite aggressively with online teaching because our rising student numbers were eclipsing the seating capacity of our largest theatres, and we had converted 57 per cent of first-year didactic lectures in the MBBS programme to online formats. We had also developed simulation laboratories in recent years, such as a virtual anatomy laboratory, that could be transformed to online purposes. COVID-19 has accelerated these trends, and more.

Early in the year, just as the outbreak was beginning to spread beyond Wuhan, HKUMed and all of HKU made a swift transition to safe learning — which meant moving almost all learning online. Since then, all HKUMed undergraduate lectures have been recorded and professionally edited and made available online.