Minho MD: Training faculty in the transition to a case-based learning curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic.

<b>Background</b>: The change in the teaching-learning process requires that faculty adjust their role towards facilitators of the learning process, as occurs in case-based learning (CBL) sessions. The School of Medicine of the University of Minho, as part of its new curriculum, MinhoMD, began a faculty development program dedicated to the CBL facilitation. The program was centered in simulations, involving encounters between faculty and senior high-school students. Due to the pandemic situations, all training took place in a virtual environment. <b>Method</b>: All faculty members to be engaged in the CBL-sessions and senior high school students were asked to respond to an anonymous feedback form composed of both 5-point Likert scale items and open answer questions about the relevance, usefulness, motivation, and satisfaction after participating in the CBL simulation sessions. The qualitative evaluation content analysis was based on Bardin. <b>Results</b>: All facilitators and students rated the relevance and usefulness as 4-5 (out of 5). All classified their satisfaction in the upper 4-5 grades. Students conveyed very high motivation to learn using CBL with all rating in the 4-5 grades, of which 78% as 5/5. Regarding the open questions, six key-elements were found based on the content analysis: practicing, autonomy, knowledge and learning, group discussion and teamwork, useful training, practical and interesting activity. Ten facilitators of the ongoing MinhoMD curriculum were asked, 6 months after the training sessions, about their usefulness to the real scenario. All considered them to have been useful: 60% classified it as 5/5, 30% as 4/5, and 10% as 3/5. <b>Conclusions</b>: The online simulation sessions successfully promoted the practice of CBL scenarios in the new MinhoMD faculty development. Of notice, high-school students revealed to be an excellent population for the training practice of faculty and to motivate students to the student-centered learning processes. Keywords: CBL; online sessions; faculty development.