A Comparative Study of the Educational Agility’s Dimensions in Face-to-face and Virtual Spaces Based on Medical Students’ Views: Experiencing a Change

Organizational agility is the ability of an organization to respond quickly to uncertain and unpredictable environmental conditions. After the COVID-19 pandemic, students had diverse experiences of providing educational services virtually. The present study was conducted to compare the educational agility status in two modes of face-to-face and virtual from the perspective of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences students.

The research method was descriptive survey on 372 students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2022 who had experienced both virtual and face-to-face education and were randomly selected from various faculties. The researcher-made questionnaire was a 5-option Likert scale that was sent electronically to the students' emails. To analyze the data, paired t-test, independent t-test, ANOVA, and Pearson's correlation test were used. The data was analyzed using SPSS 24 software.

Agility in the responsiveness (P<0.001), integrity (P<0.001), and adecuacy (P<0.001) components in the face-to-face mode was significantly higher than the virtual mode, but in the flexibility (P<0.001) and speed (P<0.001) components, the virtual environment score was significantly higher than the face-to-face mode. In general, the mean total educational agility in both environments did not have a significant difference (P=0.225). All components of educational agility had a high correlation with each other and with the total score(P<0.001).

It seems that face-to-face and virtual environments enhance some of the capabilities of educational agility. It is obvious that a combined use of both face-to-face and virtual modes can be much more effective in promoting organizational agility. Development of technology is one of the main solutions and requirements in increasing the agility of educational organizations.