Publication date: Jul 21, 2025
Face-to-face teaching was quickly moved to remote teaching following the introduction of a national lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK) on 23 March 2020 to tackle the coronavirus pandemic 2019 (COVID-19). In this context, De Montfort University (DMU, UK) expanded and adapted its pre-existing open-access virtual learning environment, named e-Biology (http://parasitology. dmu. ac. uk/ebiology/), to better support clinical biochemistry education in a remote setting. Originally created in 2017 to assist students’ transition into biomedical science programmes, e-Biology was updated with specific modules for clinical biochemistry, including theoretical, laboratory, microscope, and case study components. This package has been used to teach final-year BSc Biomedical Science students since 2020/2021. Detailed analysis of scores of two multiple choice question tests distributed at the beginning (preScore; 39. 3% and 41. 4% successful, for all the cohort and paired students’ exams, respectively) and end of the module (postScore; 41. 8% and 45. 3% successful), did show an improvement in students’ overall performance but without statistical significance. However, this improvement showed statistical significance for the paired exams for the last cohort (2022/2023; from 34. 0% to 46. 8%; p
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Biochemistry | clinical biochemistry |
| Coronavirus | clinical reasoning |
| Postscore | e‐biology |
| Students | virtual learning |
| virtual practicals |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Tropicamide |