Practicing through Emergency Remote Learning: Transformation of Topic-specific Lecture into a Lesson Plan Experienced during the COVID-19 Crisis

Medical education has been facing the unprecedented challenges of clinical teaching since the emergence of COVID-19 crisis early this year in 2020. Despite the crisis, many institutions have been continuing teaching without interruption. Current crisis was so sudden and unwarranted that many schools were shut down while other adopted to emergency remote teaching. Institutions with online and face-to-face (F2F) blended learning were in better position to face the challenge with little work to engage students with a compulsive student-cantered self-directed and personalised learning approaches as a solution. However, emergency remote learning came as the first experience by many teachers in a well mandated social distancing. As stated, institutions with experiences of planned online teaching design as part of their existing blended or open distant learning (ODL) experience, emergency remote teaching (ERT) was observed as a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate mode due uncalled for crisis. Practicing through emergency remote learning environment necessitated transforming of topics (traditional lectures in F2F teaching) into a lesson plan mandated to continuing teaching in COVID crisis. A lesson plan is a teacher detailed description of the topic developed with instructional events for a lesson. Author together with other teaching faculty and support of senior management developed a strategical model using Gagne’s nine instructional events to convert each topic into a lesson plan as part of institutional practice of continuing learning with minimal competency achieved by every learner. Current manuscript is an attempt to share this experience with global community facing the COVID-19 pandemic ordered with control movement in a locked down situation.