JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Since the closure of university campuses due to COVID-19 in Spring 2020 necessitated a quick transition to online courses, medical students were isolated from hospitals and universities, negatively impacting their education. During this time, medical students had no opportunity to participate in academic discussions and were also socially isolated. Furthermore, during the pandemic, faculty were handed additional responsibilities and did not have enough time to contribute effectively to the education of medical students.

Objective:

This paper describes the establishment of the Cerrahpasa Neuroscience Society Journal Clubs, a group of entirely student-run online journal clubs at Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa - Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine.

Methods:

The website, mass emailing, and social media accounts were used to announce the online journal clubs. Only medical students were made eligible to apply. Journal clubs included psychiatry, neuroradiology, neurosurgery, neurology, and neuroscience. Following the last journal club meeting, a questionnaire created by the society's board was distributed to the participants. SPSS Statistics was used for statistical analysis (version 26).

Results:

Since 15 March 2021, synchronous online journal club meetings have been held every two weeks on a weekday using Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. Meetings of each journal club lasted about an hour on average. Inter-student interaction across multiple institutions was achieved since a total of 45 students from 11 different universities attended the meetings on a regular basis. Students on the society's board served as academic mentors for the clubs. The clubs received excellent feedback from participants, with an overall contentment score of 4.32 out of 5.

Conclusions:

By establishing these clubs, we have created a venue for academic discussions, which helps to reduce the negative impact of the pandemic on education. In addition, we believe it greatly aided students in staying in touch with their peers, thereby reducing the sense of isolation. We realize that traditional journal clubs are run by faculty; however, we believe that this experience demonstrated that medical students could run a journal club on their own since the feedback from participants was excellent. Additionally, as a medical student, being a journal club academic mentor is a challenging responsibility; however, having this responsibility significantly improved our academic mentors' leadership abilities.