It is difficult to implement interprofessional education (IPE) in the classroom due to COVID-19. To share our knowledge of online IPE, we report on how we provided IPE for first-year students at two universities. At Mie University, a class was implemented to use Zoom. Quizzes and chats promoted interactions between instructors and students. At Hokkaido University of Science, an online team medical experience game was conducted via Zoom and a Learning Management System (LMS). The activity promoted interaction between students through gameplay and clear instructions. In both cases, students could successfully develop online IPE based on existing learning methods. Through their experience, it was clear that students are able to understand other professionals’ roles. They were also to commit to membership and/or teamship. On the other hand, students faced challenges with faculty familiarity and time allocation.

For this second report, we divided the efforts of the University of Tsukuba into two parts. In the first part, we introduced the Interprofessional program, an inter-university collaborative educational program between the University of Tsukuba and Ibaraki Prefectural University of Health Sciences. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was conducted using TBL (Team-based learning) in a large conference room. After the pandemic, this was conducted online (using Zoom). The main changes due to the online implementation were the following five points; (1) online faculty meetings, (2) advance distribution of materials, (3) testing using Google Forms, (4) group work using the breakout function, and (5) simultaneous editing using Google Docs. In the future, we would like to examine the possibility of new educational methods while creating innovations that are possible only through online interprofessional educational programs.

In the second part of the second report, we introduce the Care Colloquium, an inter-university collaborative educational program between the University of Tsukuba and the Tokyo University of Science. The Care Colloquium is an interprofessional education program that uses PBL (Problem-based learning). In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was implemented online using Microsoft Teams, with advance preparation including manual maintenance and communication testing. The same learning outcomes were achieved as the face-to-face implementation. Undergraduate interprofessional education tends to be a large-scale program, and the shortage of faculty and classrooms is challenging, but online education could overcome these obstacles. The development of hybrid programs that use the merits of both face-to-face and online education may lead to the promotion of interprofessional education in the future.