Student: A Neglected Element in Facing the Challenges of Medical Education during the COVID-19 Era

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has startled all of us, caused rapid and major changes in the higher education system of Iran, especially in the field of medical education. Although since 2001 the education system is trying to use virtual /distance education (1), until the start of the pandemic, e-learning had a low share in the educational programs of most medical universities and was considered as a less important secondary educational method. Since controlling the pandemic requires avoiding face-to-face training, e-learning is the most important way to provide educational content and holding courses in almost all medical universities of Iran. According to the literature, e-learning is faced with five challenges related to the university, professors, students, e-learning systems, and e-classroom environment (2). However, there are studies which mentioned to four categories of challenges, including technical and technological (weakness in telecommunications infrastructure), teachers and learners (unfamiliarity with the structure and technology used for e-learning), ethical challenges (weakness of existing technologies for fraud detection), and problems related to psychological issues (technology-related anxieties such as power and internet outages and system crashes).