Medical students' perspectives about the traditional and the integrated learning programs in the college of medicine- University of Bisha
Abstract Purpose: Students’ approaches to learning are central to the process of learning. There is strong debate about the efficiency of traditional learning program (TLP) and the integrated learning program (ILP) in medical schools. TLP is easy for the students being passive learners and for the tutors playing the role of sage on the stage. ILP is mainly student centered in which the students are active learners with mentoring of their tutors. It is important to know the perspectives of medical school students about both programs as they used to apply TLP in the 1st year and starting ILP from the 2nd year. Methodology: This study adopted quantitative research methodology. We addressed the 2nd and 3rd year medical students. Online survey using the Google forms was applied for data collection. Results: agreement of the integrated program (80.8%) exceeded the traditional (48.5%) especially in improving the communication skills, dealing with new technologies, reinforcement of competencies in the research field, and to less extent for its suitability to be applied in medical schools nowadays, development of desired doctor skills to deal with patients and for provision of good approach for medical practice, and lastly for its suitability to identify and deal with the community needs. There was no statistical significance between both programs regarding support of professionalism values. The disagreement of ILP (19.2%) was much lower than TLP (51.5%). Conclusion: Integrated learning program becomes an innovative tool for learning in medical schools with very good compliance among the medical students.