# Healer’s Art in the Online Era: Successes, Challenges, and Implications

## TL;DR

This study shows that an online version of a health professional course, HART, is just as effective as in-person for teaching emotional and interpersonal skills.

## Contribution

The study demonstrates the online format's effectiveness for affective domain learning in health professional education.

## Key findings

- Online and in-person HART cohorts had similar high ratings for course quality, faculty, and group experience.
- Online HART supported student development in community, identity, self-care, and relationships.
- Narrative responses revealed insights into online learning challenges and successes.

## Abstract

Healer’s Art (HART), a health professional elective course, shifted to online platforms during the pandemic year (2020–2021). Because HART focuses on affective domain aspects of such education, the question arose of its validity and efficacy in the online format. This study aimed to identify challenges and experiences of online versus in-person HART learners.

The authors compared students’ end-of-course evaluations between in-person and online cohorts across 3 years. The evaluations included Likert scale responses compared between cohorts with Fisher’s exact tests. Novel questions with narrative responses in the online cohort’s evaluation captured information on challenges with the online platform. Narrative responses were analyzed using constant comparative analysis.

No difference was found between in-person (n = 654) and online cohorts (n = 570) in ratings of good/excellent for the overall course (1111/1203, 92.4%), course faculty (1184/1214, 97.5%), and small group experience (1142/1208, 94.5%). Thematic analysis of narrative responses indicated that online HART engagement supported student development of community, professional identity formation, self-care, and relationships.

The findings suggest that HART effectively supports affective domain learning in medical and health professional students whether delivered in-person or online. The authors share challenges and successes of online HART, thus increasing the delivery versatility of this course.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-024-02272-w.