May a Distance Learning Course in Statistics Satisfy Medical Students? The Experience with an Italian University Sample During the Covid Pandemic

Teaching medical statistics online poses several difficulties related both to the subject and the use of technology. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a traditional medical statistics course was forced to be held online. The study investigates the impact of such a transformation in terms of both the student satisfaction and the stress at the end of the course, by taking into account the attitudes toward statistics before and after the academic course. The results show that the students’ learning satisfaction was on average 30.1 (5.8). Analyzing the singles items: over 70% of students were satisfied of the technology used, even if only about 18% would participate in a new online course. Students were stressed and half of them reported high levels of stress.