Assessing student engagement in a multi-media teaching tool in Pharmacy

The School of Pharmacy at the University of Waterloo offers an Integrated Patient Focused Care (IPFC) course series to students with the first of nine courses being taught in their second year. IPFC1 includes sections on Pharmacokinetics, Clinical Biochemistry, Immunology, Critical Appraisal and Patient Focused Care. The Pharmacokinetics section is taught using an online and in-class blended approach. A survey of the 2009 cohort demonstrated that this format aided in student learning and that enthusiasm for this section of the course increased over time. A more traditional, lecture-based section of this course, Clinical Biochemistry, was not well received by students; their feedback suggested that they were not able to make clear links between laboratory data and patient assessment.\nWe used student feedback from the 2010 course offering to drive the development of a multi-media online learning module and face-to-face instructor-led tutorial to teach the Clinical Biochemistry section of the course this winter. The design and implementation of the new modules provided us with an opportunity to investigate whether the introduction of multi-media based teaching using virtual field trips, self-assessments and a single face-to-face tutorial increased student understanding of the connections between the results from lab measurements and patient assessment and whether this teaching format enhanced student engagement.\nWe will present how assessment of student learning and engagement was accomplished before and after the introduction of the online components, the results of our analysis of exam grades from both years and our qualitative analysis of students’ feedback from the 2011 class.