Under the influences of the COVID-19, how to run the yearly SMU-FAIMER Regional Institute program is an emerging challenge for us. By our efforts, we managed to carry it out by a blended on-line faculty development mode this year. Whereas fellows and faculty members from China took on-site teaching and learning, international faculty members and fellows joined on-line. This kind of blended on-line teaching requires quite a lot cooperation, technical support and even more endeavours.

How do I know if my students are paying attention when all I see is a black screen? My online classes are taking longer than in-person classes. Do I need to redesign the class? These are some of the questions that educators grapple with the online migration of classes. The pandemic-related pressure for the online migration of classes has now given us the opportunity to reimagine the education landscape. Join us for an interactive sharing session on practical strategies for student engagement and curricular design in an online class, from the broader flipped classroom, to the niche-oriented Team-Based Learning approaches.

In response to the closure of educational institutions due to COVID 19 the authorities are switching towards other modes of teaching and learning mostly distance learning or online learning. The major purpose of shifting to these models/pedagogies is to prevent the disruption of education and reaching the learners remotely. Out of different models/pedagogies used for online teaching and learning today one of the interesting approaches that has gained popularity is the Flipped classroom approach. In a Flipped classroom, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions and carry out research at home while engaging in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of a mentor. It has also helped teachers in terms of prioritizing active learning during class time by assigning students lecture materials and presentations to be viewed at home. The Flipped classroom approach has gained a great attention and emerges out to be an effective alternative for a traditional classroom and face to face teaching and learning.

COVID-19 offered opportunity for an open mind, trial and error and change to implement anatomy teaching and learning without accessing the cadaver. The voices of ardent advocates for the absolute necessity of dissection and/or demonstration of prosected human cadavers to produce good medical practitioners are silenced. These anatomy educators overnight changed their tunes and rushed for publishing articles on image-based anatomy teaching, which were published with a record-breaking speed in the notable journals – never seen before. At our medical school, we implemented online anatomy teaching from face-to-face format with our existing resources and the transition was seamless and effective.

Clinical education is the classic teaching method in a medical school. However, in recent years, there have been trends in medical education that impede full-fledged clinical education, including pandemic emergencies that are forcing medical universities to switch to distance learning. We offer an innovative teaching method based on open access virtual patient authoring tool to stimulate clinical reasoning in online learning environment, which has proven to be effective.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has led to significant challenges in the delivery of clinical skills for medical schools. How to teach and assess skills in clinical history taking, physical examination, clinical reasoning, and procedural skills within the constraints of physical distancing and severely restricted access to clinical and teaching settings such as hospital wards and simulation rooms? We hope our experiences in addressing this challenge as teachers in Years 1 and 2 of the University of Queensland MD programme provide some benefit to fellow teachers of clinical skills and colleagues teaching biomedical skills and procedures.