The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, has performed research that suggests hybrid learning would be the future of medical education. The structured virtual group discussion (SVGD) style was shown to be a more useful and engaging method than traditional virtual learning, according to the study. For the postgraduate Physiology students from AIIMS, the SVGD format was implemented.

Researchers tracked both supervised and unsupervised interactions that resulted in active involvement with the students while experimenting with the SVGD technique. The study’s findings were published in a reputable international magazine of medical education and honoured by the Association of Physiologists and Pharmacologists with the Dev Raj Bajaj Award for the best research article for the advancement of modern methods.

At the Department of Physiology, AIIMS, New Delhi, a team of four doctors—Dr Simran Kaur, Dr Dinu S Chandran, Dr Megha Bir, and Professor KK Deepak—conducted the study, which was approved by Professor KP Kochhar, the current head of the division.

“We decided to adopt the SVGD approach to teach students in an online mode during COVID as face-to-face teaching was not possible,” according to Dr Simran Kaur, the method’s primary researcher at AIIMS Delhi.

The panel began by distributing validated questionnaires to students in order to get their comments before analysing the instruction to be delivered using this SVGD method.