A meta-analysis of online education in medical education, found no evidence for enhanced effectiveness of face-to-face instruction on medical students’ knowledge, skills, or retention of material. A meta-study examining the effect of delivery timing within distance education found greater student achievement with asynchronous teaching than classroom instruction while a separate study employing random assignment found that there was no statistically different performance on course exams for students in an online or face-to-face section of a course.

There are several advantages to asynchronous learning since participants can learn on their own time and schedule. Asynchronous learning results when the instructor and learners are not engaged in the learning process at the same time and real-time interactions with other people are absent. Synchronous learning may take place in a face-to-face environment, with all participants being in the same physical location, or it may occur online, via a virtual platform or videoconferencing technology. Synchronous learning fosters real-time feedback and interactions between the instructor and participants. Despite this growing interest in online education, most veterinary curricula have retained a traditional, didactic mode of instruction, where the students and instructor meet in a fixed location for a defined period of time each week (i.e., synchronous instruction). The Journal of Veterinary Medical Education dedicated an issue to this topic in 2007. Investigations into the feasibility of these techniques to counteract faculty shortages in veterinary medical education and analyses of the cost/benefit to online approaches have been reported since the late 2000s. The efficacy of distance education in science and veterinary curricula has long been a topic of investigation, with multiple studies aiming to assess the effects of online delivery on student learning and classroom interactions. Results suggest that although some veterinary students perceived the switch in delivery format negatively, the method of delivery did not adversely affect performance in this preclinical course. Moving from letter grades to pass/fail did not change access frequency to supplemental course materials but led to decreased video usage in the asynchronous course. Asynchronous course materials were uniformly accessed across all days of the week, while supplemental materials for the face-to-face course showed a weekly pattern. Lack of instructor interaction was an important perceived barrier in the asynchronous course.

Students’ academic performance was unaffected by delivery method. Assessments evaluated in this study were identical across courses. Academic performance and patterns of access to materials in the online course was compared with the access patterns and performance of students given classroom-based synchronous teaching in Spring 2019.

This method of delivery predated the pandemic and was used throughout the course. This course relied on asynchronous narrated presentations for content delivery. This study surveyed student perspectives and academic performance in a pre-planned online second-year veterinary toxicology course given at North Carolina State University in Spring 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted instruction at many veterinary schools to switch to an emergency remote teaching format to prevent viral transmission associated with in-person synchronous lectures.

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