This study is designed to obtain information and to identify differences between medical students as well as to understand the motivations and obstacles for medical students investing their time during COVID 19 obligatory home stay.
Time Investment of Medical Students during COVID19 Pandemic is highly crucial and because of the impact of Covid19 on medical students especially on time management, so it is important to examine time investments for facilitating the ongoing instruction during the period of lock down.
There is a lack of data and information about this subject in Sudan and there is a need to conduct such studies and we hope that the information from our study helping in the control of The global spread of COVID19.
The results of this survey shown considerable variation of medical students in investing their time (Table 2), These findings are rather disappointing. Most of students during lockdown spend 1-2 hours to study (27.6%) and less than an hour (27.3%), One unanticipated finding was that (20.1%) of the medical students during the lockdown do not study at all, a possible explanation for this might be due lack of motivation in the medical students to study during the lockdown which might be caused by closure of universities during Covid19 pandemic and most of these universities didn’t start online learning. [8] To make a good use of time for medical Students it is necessary to organize the time and we found the suitable way to do that for students by developing a work plan beside staying focus which can be done by Choose a suitable location, avoid distraction, avoid pressure and set realistic goal and those are important factor to invest the time (Table 3). The current study found that most of participants don’t feel satisfied with the time management that they have done during lockdown (63.1%) These result is in agreement with those obtained by (Gagne and Shepherd (2001),) [11] “students in the online course indicated that they were less satisfied with instructor availability than the in class students.
During the period of the lockdown there were a lot of Productive work that medical students able to do with the Social Distancing and we found that learning new language is the most common thing in the mind of medical students more than conducting researches (Table 4). we think that medical students and universities should give more care for research.
Being mindful is the best way to look for mental health (Table 5). with reading books like Medicine text books, Religious books, Novels and cultural books during the lock down, the most common books have been read by the medical students are medical textbooks which is not surprising for us. Also they seen that adequate sleep and eat a healthy food are the most suitable way to be physically healthy (Table 6).
Most of participants think Coronavirus has affected Medical Students (95.2%) as we expected and think that they can help out during the Coronavirus Crisis (88%) we didn’t expect this finding on the other hand most of the participant’s did not participate in any volunteer work during Covid-19 outbreak (70.3%) which strongly confirm with suggest that medical students should not be involved in any direct patient care activities [12] due to higher susceptibility of getting infection with Covid19.
Medical students at ALzaiem ALazhari university were found to be use meeting apps to facilitate learning in the virtual classroom rather than of university’s website and others for online studding, most of the participants (whom start online learning) see that it is better than conversation teaching because they see that online learning adds more flexibility and give self-based learning process (Table 7). so it prefers more than others for medical students learning these results reflect those of (B. Jean Mandernach, Amber Dailey-Hebert, and Emily Donnelli-Sallee at Park University in 2007) [13]who also found that interaction time in the online class as an approximate equivalent to scheduled class time in the face-to-face classroom, although most of them do not like online learning during the quarantine period, it may be because their Internet is unstable and requires a strong Internet signal to learn online. Other studies have shown that online learning requires more time and effort because Personal face-face-to-face training (Berge, Muilenburg, & Haneghan, 2002;[14]Cavanaugh, 2005; [15] Hartman, Dziuban, & Moskal, 2000;[16] O'Quinn & Corry 2002;[17] Pattillo, 2005;[18]) online instruction requires more deliberate planning of learning outcomes, activities, and support (DeVries & Lim, 2003)[19] ,A case study report found that teaching the online version of one sample course required more than twice the amount of time than the same course in class (Pattillo, 2005) [18]. We found that during the lockdown most common medical student’s activities is participate in online courses (Table 8). In part, this may be due to the fact that that an online course does not have similar requirements as course materials are preprepared and available to students [11] during the Covid19 pandemic and most of the online course became free.
online instruction requires a significant investment of time to prepare, design, and review course structure as well as to implement alternative teaching techniques and assessments (Lim, 2001) [19], all this can be the reasons that prevent some faculty departments in the college from starting online learning during lock down.
Limitations of the study:
We acknowledge several limitations of this study; the sample size in this study is small that is because the data were collected from one medical college and that is make us unable to make a compression between different medical college in the Sudan about time investments. also the response rate in data collection was very poor through online google form which prevent us to reach a represented sample.
There is no relevant literature related to our topic that make us unable to make compression with previous studies in our dissection.