The impact of the Virtual Ophthalmology Clinic on medical students' learning: a randomised controlled trial

Aim

The Virtual Ophthalmology Clinic (VOC) is an interactive web-based teaching module, with special emphasis on history taking and clinical reasoning skills. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of VOC on medical students'' learning.

Methods

A randomised controlled trial (RCT) was conducted with medical students from the University of Sydney (n=188) who were randomly assigned into either an experimental (n=93) or a control group (n=95). A pre- and post-test and student satisfaction questionnaire were administered. Twelve months later a follow-up test was conducted to determine the long-term retention rate of graduates.

Results

There was a statistically significant (P<0.001) within-subject improvement pre- to post rotation in the number of correctly answered questions for both the control and experimental groups (mean improvement for control 10%, 95% CI 1.3–2.6, and for experimental 17.5%, 95% CI 3.0–4.0). The improvement was significantly greater in the experimental group (mean difference in improvement between groups 7.5%, 95% CI 0.8–2.3, P<0.001). At 12 months follow-up testing, the experimental group scored on average 1.6 (8%) (95%CI 0.4 to 2.7, P=0.007) higher than the controls.

Conclusion

On the basis of a statistically significant improvement in academic performance and highly positive student feedback, the implementation of VOC may provide a means to address challenges to ophthalmic learning outcomes in an already crowded medical curriculum.