Abstract
Like most of the pharmacy colleges in developing countries with high population growth, public pharmacy colleges in Egypt are experiencing a significant increase in students’ enrollment annually due to the large youth population, accompanied with the keenness of students to join pharmacy colleges as a step to a better future career. In this context, large lectures represent a popular approach for teaching the students as economic and logistic constraints prevent splitting them into smaller groups. Nevertheless, the impact of large lectures in relation to student learning has been widely questioned due to their educational limitations, which are related to the passive role the students maintain in lectures. Despite the reported feebleness underlying large lectures and lecturing in general, large lectures will likely continue to be taught in the same format in these countries. Accordingly, to soften the negative impacts of large lectures, this article describes a simple and feasible 5-step paper-based model to transform lectures from a passive information delivery space into an active learning environment. This model mainly suits educational establishments with financial constraints, nevertheless, it can be applied in lectures presented in any educational environment to improve active participation of students. The components and the expected advantages of employing the 5-step paper-based model in large lectures as well as its limitations and ways to overcome them are presented briefly. The impact of applying this model on students’ engagement and learning is currently being investigated.
Highlights
In the Middle East, Egypt pioneered in introducing pharmacy education, which started at Cairo
Egypt has the largest number of pharmacy colleges in the Middle East, either public or private, that results in more than 13,000 pharmacist graduates annually [1], pharmacy colleges are still experiencing significant growth in students’ enrollments annually
It is worth noting that colorcolored cards can be used as a low cost and low tech replacement for clickers. Another published way to amend the dynamics of large lectures and widen students’ participation was by allowing them to tweet their questions to the lecturer via Twitter
Summary
In the Middle East, Egypt pioneered in introducing pharmacy education, which started at Cairo. Traditional didactic lectures have serious educational limitations as they mainly improve the students’ ability to recall knowledge and do not suit higher levels of learning that require active participation and engagement of students within the educational environment [5,6]. It was reported that the current generation learners have even shorter attention span that lasts 7 min [10] or less [11] Another drawback of large lectures is the lack of instant feedback on students’ understanding or progress during information delivery [3]. The students perform instructional activities and think about what they are doing through reading, writing, discussing, or being engaged in solving problems [3] This allows the students to reflect back upon what they have learnt and eventually produce significant improvement in terms of the learning outcomes. Ideal active learning environments are rich in instructional activities that engage students in higher-order thinking activities such as analysis, evaluation and synthesis to improve conceptual understanding, problem-solving and critical thinking in students [12,13,14]
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