Students’ initial perspectives on online learning experience in China during the COVID-19 outbreak: expanding online education for future doctors on a national scale

Table 3 T-tests and the effect size of orientation towards online-learning

Student’s view towards formal orientation provided by institutions	Good ^a		Poor		Diff	p-value	Cohen’s d ^b
	mean	95% CI	mean	95% CI	Diff	p-value	Cohen’s d ^b
*Difficulties/problems encountered in online learning*
Rejection of online teaching	0.16	0.15–0.16	0.34	0.33–0.34	0.18	< 0.001	0.43
Network congestion	0.78	0.77–0.78	0.75	0.74–0.75	−0.03	< 0.001	0.08
Poor arrangements and scheduling	0.15	0.14–0.15	0.33	0.32–0.33	0.18	< 0.001	0.44
Poor preparation of courses	0.04	0.03–0.04	0.12	0.11–0.12	0.08	< 0.001	0.33
Untimely feedback & question-answering	0.08	0.07–0.08	0.14	0.13–0.14	0.06	< 0.001	0.20
Insufficient interaction	0.41	0.41–0.42	0.52	0.50–0.51	0.11	< 0.001	0.21
Insufficient learning resources	0.25	0.24–0.25	0.37	0.36–0.37	0.12	< 0.001	0.27
Overall satisfaction towards online-learning experience ^c	0.79	0.79–0.80	0.29	0.29–0.30	−0.50	< 0.001	1.04

^a Responses of evaluation regarding “formal orientation” were collapsed into two categories: “good formal orientation” (excellent and good) and “poor formal orientation” (neutral, poor, bad, and no idea), and given relative value of 1 and 0 respectively
^b As a measure of effect size, Cohen’s d was calculated (with 0.2 indicating a small effect, 0.5 a medium effect and 0.8 a large effect)
^c Selection of “Agree” and “strongly agree” were considered for the overall satisfaction

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