Evaluation of Students' Satisfaction and Attitudes Toward Blended Learning in Medical Education: A Survey in Randomized Controlled Trial Course

Background: E-learning has been widely carried out in higher education, but it also has some drawbacks, such as requirements of self-learning initiative and computer skills, and sense of isolation. In previous years, many researchers put forward blended learning, the mixture of e-learning and face-to-face learning, taking advantages of both learning modes. Now blended learning has grown rapidly in education, but it is at the preliminary stage of exploration, and there is a lack of studies that have examined the satisfaction with blended learning. Objective: To evaluate medical students' satisfaction and attitudes toward blended learning compared with previous traditional learning in medical education. Methods: The randomized controlled trial course lasted two weeks and included three parts: 1) slides, videos, further reading and discussion forum on Moodle interactive platform for e-learning; 2) contact session with local tutors, including questions answering and works on protocol; 3) face-to-face lectures and comments on protocol from a professor. A total of 27 medical students from Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science & Technology voluntarily took full participation in the course. After the course, questionnaire survey on satisfaction and attitudes was conducted via e-mail. Results: The response rate was 96.3% (26/27). Of all the respondents, 92.3% (24/26) were satisfied with the blended learning mode. Compared with previous traditional learning experience, 100% of the respondents believed that blended learning is more helpful and that they had better access to the learning materials and greater independence in study, 84.6% (22/26) thought their motivation was improved, 92.3% (24/26) believed their involvement with the course was increased, 73.1% (19/26) felt more in control of their learning, 88.5% (23/26) thought learning was more efficient. Moreover, 65.4% (17/26) were happy with the current mixture of e-learning and face-to-face contact time. Conclusions: Our results suggest that most of the medical students are satisfied with blended learning and that blended learning is better and more helpful than both traditional face-to-face learning and e-learning. Blended learning is promising and worthwhile for further application in medical education in China.