**7.5 Empowering teachers for a digital world**

With the dynamic circumstances emerging due to the crisis, it is of utmost importance for the faculty to upgrade their digital skills. Special training courses are being organized to empower teaching faculty and staff to use innovative learning and assessment tools in medical education.

A major barrier to adopt innovative methods of teaching was a natural preference and comfort level regarding face-to-face learning. However COVID-19 served as a fuel to drive this transformation, bringing a positive inclination towards e-learning [63].

### **7.6 Road to collaborative and inter-professional learning**

With the online education system crossing boundaries of location and geographical constraints, new horizons for collaborative learning are arising. Global conferences, webinars and other asynchronous sessions facilitating a wider group of students, allowing students from different classes, universities or countries to get benefit from subject experts [30]. Moreover, a dire need for inter-professional education (IPE) and collaborative approach has been recognized globally, due to unequal distribution of teaching resources in developed and developing countries. Available evidence suggests that knowledge-sharing among the different professionals can lead to better patient outcomes and effective utilization of health care and learning resources [64]. Tremendous work is already underway and new avenues are being explored to deliver online IPE programs [53, 65].
