Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, impacting 1 of every 100 births. It’s important for medical students to learn how to identify CHD, and to compare a healthy heart to one with CHD. To provide remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we built an online course showcasing patient-specific 3D models, so students could get an in-depth understanding of the heart. We also made sure our course suited different learning styles, and featured several teaching tools to support students. We collaborated with professors from the UBC Faculty of Medicine to evaluate our e-learning course in the MED411 Cardiac Murmurs session – which 200-300 students participate in every year.

To see if the course improved learning outcomes, we asked students to take a test before and after using the course. After the course, we asked each student several questions about how much they liked the course and how motivated they were to use it in their studies.

Our study showed that our course was able to improve learning. Students enjoyed their experiences and were motivated by the materials. Our research shows that e-learning courses using 3D-modelling to teach anatomy are helpful and desired by undergraduate medical students.