Online classes, particularly pre-med science pre-requisite courses. To take or not to take? This is one of the more contentious issues in medical education. Many medical school admissions committees, rightfully, question the rigor of online courses. Many of these courses may be taught by part-time adjuncts or graduate TAs who may not have the incentive to promote a truly rigorous student experience. Further, unless the faculty in question works to incorporate technology such as Zoom or WebEx into the class, students may never be able to truly interact with one another or the professor. This really goes against what medicine is about: In person interaction.
On the other side of the coin are the undergraduate and graduate institutions who are realizing that moving online saves money. Instead of having to hire several full-time tenured faculty, trying to figure out how to utilize scarce classroom space on campus, and trying to figure out how to develop more student services for face-to-face students, they are realizing that they can create Canvas or Blackboard courses, hire an army of adjuncts and actually increase enrollments while keeping overall costs low.
Caught in the middle are students trying to figure out what to do. Contrary to what many admissions committee members may think, most students are not taking online classes to take the "easy way out." For many, these classes fit their work or family obligations. For my brothers and sisters who are in the military, online classes may be the only viable way to advance a degree. Depending on the school, online classes may be less costly than face-to-face classes. Some people may live at a significant distance from a traditional brick-and-mortor universty and so may only have online classes that they can take. The technology has advanced to a point where students can now do online biology and chemistry labs and depending on the instructor, robust classes can be taken. The issue of online classes is one that medical schools need to reexamine in light of the changing times.
I’ve taught at the university level, face-to-face and online and I’ve been a student in both environments. Personally, I do not have a preference as to which environment that I learn in and I can’t sit her and honestly say that the face-to-face environment is more rigorous than the online environment. Certainly, the classes that I have taught in the online environment have been every bit is tough as my face-to-face classes. The bottom line is that as a student, there are a lot of reasons why you may have to take online classes. I completed a significant portion of my pre-med pre-reqs online (and at community colleges), one of my undergraduate degrees and both of my master’s degrees from Northern Arizona University and Michigan State University respectively, were completed online. For me, I served in the military and after the military, I had to work full time through most of my remaining undergraduate schooling and all of grad school. Student loans weren’t an option for me at the time. Throughout my medical school application cycle, not a single question has come up regarding me having taken classes online. NOT. A. SINGLE. ONE. This may be due to my overall academic performance or it may be due to the fact that more medical schools are now realizing the reality that 1) More and more undergraduate schools are offering significant portions of their curricula online and students may not have much choice in the matter (One of the schools where I completed one of my undergraduate degrees at, Arizona State University, now has its entire B.S. in Biochemistry and its B.S. & B.A. in Biology online, including some of the labs. Most of the students in these programs are pre-med and many are going on to medical school…) and 2) Unless a medical school is going to devote extensive manpower hours to trying to determine if every class a student takes is online, there is no practical way to easily determine who was an online student. My degrees don’t say, “Michigan State University M.S. Pharmacology & Toxicology Online.” You’d have to do some digging to figure it out and even then, it would not be easy since MSU runs face-to-face and online sections of all the classes in the pharmacology department.
My advice is this. It would be wisest to take all of your classes face-to-face if you can, however, if you must take a portion or complete all of your coursework online, make sure that you do so at a reputable university. Next, when you get to the point of applying to medical school, realize that there are some medical school such as Johns Hopkins and the University of California system medical schools, that will not accept online courses and they may heavily scrutinize the transcripts of all applicants whom they choose to interview. Make sure that you are researching the schools that you are applying to in order to get a sense of how they will view online classes. That said, and I don’t have empirical evidence of this, I believe that the majority of medical schools will not care if your courses/degree is online. Bottom line is that if you perform well in your classes and on your MCAT, you will get into medical school. I hold three acceptances and will be starting medical school in July 2021. Conventional wisdom says that I should not have gotten into medical school at all yet here I am. I also believe that times are changing, particularly now that COVID has forced medical schools to move many of their classes online. I don’t think that we will ever see a day when all classes are online at the medical school level, but I think that in the future, you will see certain classes move online AND you will see a weakening to the traditional medical school resistance to online courses. The medical school that I will be attending, ATSU-SOMA, has since its founding (2007), conducted significant portions of the OMS-II basic sciences curriculum online. Times are changing and whether the medical schools want to change or not, they will have to.
