Within an elective course for Third Year pharmacy students, I teach about the drug discovery process and international collaborations to discover natural products. To engage the students in better understanding the complex relationships between countries within this process we utilize an in-class game simulation where groups of students try to achieve preset goals in collaboration and competition with other groups. Gamification of these concepts help students better understand the complexity and motivations behind the process of natural products drug discovery.

Students must learn that in a real-life setting, many answers to medical questions may not always be black or white, in which case there may be more than one appropriate way to address a difficult problem. Incorporating video-conferencing software with other online tools, team-based learning (TBL) can be used in a virtual environment to present complicated scenarios in pharmacology. Cases can be designed to help students at all levels, whether high school or professional students, to become more comfortable with the ambiguity they will often experience when making difficult decisions. 

The presentation will cover how pharmacology content is presented using appropriate clinical cases. These clinical cases are used to provide an active learning educational environment for student learning.  In addition, value of the instructional method using in-person and online formats will be discussed.

“Memory Clinics” were originally developed as memory challenges aimed at developing metacognitive skills with students in a medical pharmacology course. After positive results were obtained with a physical intervention, Memory Clinics are currently being adapted to take place in a virtual environment through the Educaplay platform, while maintaining the educational goals and general methodology of the traditional intervention.

Using obesity course as a model to educate individuals from different backgrounds and cultures.

Successful curricular integration of therapeutics with foundational science courses in pharmacy schools has long been a goal of the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education.  After several years of declining student outcomes in the Acute Cardiovascular pharmacotherapeutics course, integrated flowcharts were introduced to improve student learning and course outcomes. The integrated flowcharts provide a summary of therapeutic decision making based on applying knowledge gained from the pharmacology and therapeutics content. These charts are completed by the students during class while actively discussing the "steps" with the instructors, thereby promoting classroom participation and engagement. Implementation of the use of flowcharts was also seamless during the COVID-19 pandemic semester. The class was divided into small sessions, while the instructors' used zoom/MS whiteboard® to complete the charts with synchronous delivery. An individual student or open responses from the group were solicited as the instructors completed the charts on the call using MS PowerPoint/whiteboard®. The implementation of the flowcharts has been positively favored by the students and has significantly improved overall course outcomes.