Resources for Pharmacology Education

It’s perhaps obvious that resources for pharmacology educators form a big part of success stories for effective pharmacology education. No matter what stage of one’s pharmacology education career one is in, resources for pharmacology education, formative assessments and continuous professional development, knowledge exchange, and good equitable practice are critical components of effective teaching and learning practices.

“Are these resources readily available and accessible?” one may ask. The answer to this is not clear and formed the basis for one of the sessions in last year’s BPS educators networking meeting (ENM), attended by 30 educators. In the meeting, educators brainstormed ideas around pharmacology education resources which are summarised below. First, educators explored the resources they used for developing pharmacology educational activities.

Table 1: What resources do educators use for developing pharmacology educational activities?

 
There seem to be a good range of resources educators use for their educational activities and these are varied in features and capabilities which likely suits individual educators’ preferences or needs. Note that this list is not comprehensive nor endorsed by the BPS. Instead they are resources currently used by those who attended the ENM.

Potential downsides to the usability of some of the resources listed in Table 1 were noted. One is that some of these resources are behind a paywall which poses an accessibility and affordability challenge. Resources that involve dissemination of scientific information need to be kept up to date but some of the resources had not been recently updated. Though there seem to be plenty of information sources out there, these often do not meet the educational needs of end-users whether these be educators or students, hence, educators explored the kind of educational resources they would ideally like to help facilitate and develop their educational activities:

Table 2: What would you ideally like to be available to help develop your educational activities?
 

 

A common feature of the resource types listed in Table 2 is how these potentially reduce the time it would take to create good educational materials oneself. Considering how time-consuming preparing good learning materials are, one can easily understand why pharmacology educators have identified these as features they would like to have to help facilitate their own educational activities. Another feature in resource types in Table 2 is they make it easier to create resources that reinforce understanding which a key educational goal for a pharmacology educator.

One may argue that resources with some of these features already exist but are these behind paywalls? Do people know they exist? Are they quality controlled? These are some crucial questions that bring us to the final question asked at the ENM. When presented with an overview of existing resources on the BPS and Pharmacology Education Project (PEP) websites, educators identified ideal features for a resource website. Suggestions included that an ideal resource website should have the following features:

• Have training hub with resources and workshops for new educators
• Have emailing lists or tweetbots to update when new resources are uploaded
• Avoid the potential for linked resources to become invalid/inaccessible
• Have careers information
• Have a competency (knowledge, skills & behaviours) audit section which should be cover the diversity of careers a pharmacologist might be interested in and which should be regularly updated
• Be smartphone compatible
• Have more visual resource (less text heavy resources) and reduce need for long scrolls
• Have quality-controlled YouTube (YT) videos embedded in it.
• Be user-friendly
• Be customisable resources
• Have a linked YT channel stream
• Have an analytics of resource used feature
• Have a lowcost/resource efficient mechanism for curation/moderation/updating existing resources
• Be known to educators and usable by them
• Be interactive
• Be designed for clearly defined target audience
• Include completion tracking for sections containing training resources
• Have a misconception checker
• Have site review and section reviews features (thumbs up or down)
• Have more simulation which differentiates it from textbook resources

There are practicalities to consider for some of the feature suggested by pharmacology educators, but it is fair to say that any professional body would like its website to have excellent features that facilitate great end-user experience. That said, there are challenges to developing a resource website of the scale suggested by educator and one of such challenges is that of having the financial capability to deliver on these ‘ideal world’ features. Perhaps, prioritising resources of high impact and taking little but firm steps in developing these to high standards and making efforts to future-proof newly designed resources would a good place to start.

Also, harnessing resources from the wealth of pharmacology professionals around the world could be an important part of achieving this, including co-ordination of similar efforts between relevant professional organisations, for example, the BPS and IUPHAR. Educators could explore educational funding opportunities provided by organisations such as those offered by the BPS Education Grant to bid for funding that could enable them bring their innovative  educational resources ideas into fruition and empower them develop top-notch educational resources that could form a part of making this happen. Indeed, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.