Teaching Pharmacology to Medical Students: Preference for Faculty Interaction Over Recorded Lectures

Abstract

One impact of COVID-19 on teaching has been the utilization of the virtual classroom and, along with that, “Zoom fatigue”. At Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), one approach to reduce the scheduled screen time has been to pre-record lectures so students can access these at their convenience. Much of the pharmacology content is delivered as lecture with some content reinforcement in small group sessions. Transitioning from synchronous, live lectures to pre-recorded lectures that can be accessed asynchronously presents a number of potential challenges including building rapport with students, maintaining a common experience between the pharmacology faculty and students since the lectures can be recorded weeks or months before being accessible to the students, responding to non-verbal cues during the lecture to expand or quickly move past a concept, opportunities for faculty development in response to those non-verbal cues, and continuous quality improvement of the lecture based on real-time feedback. One solution has been the “interactive lecture”: a hybrid model in which students prepare for a synchronous session by watching a short (15-20 min) pre-recording that provides relevant physiology and potentially pharmacological strategies. Students join the synchronous session to reinforce and build on concepts from the pre-recording. Because they are coming into the session with some degree of foundational knowledge, there are more opportunities for interaction in the form of polling questions. Similar to reading the non-verbal cues in the classroom, these questions allow the instructor to respond to the students in the room and adjust the teaching focus in real-time. In this way, the session is somewhat directed by the students and their understanding and questions. Additionally, the instructor can revise the session in the future based on a better understanding of what concepts were clear and where students struggled. The IUSM second-year medical students had the experience of one course in which pharmacology was taught asynchronously with only one synchronous small group session and another course in which pharmacology was taught synchronously for all sessions either as interactive lectures or small group sessions. At the end of the second course, students received an evaluation in which they were asked to rank their preference. The overall response rate was 79% (296 of 375 students responding). Of these, 32% of students chose only the pre-recording and 13% of students chose to only access slides without any recording or live session. The remaining 55% of students included a synchronous session in their preference. Clearly, there is a large fraction of students who prefer to learn the pharmacology content independently. Based on other feedback, many of these students are utilizing non-IUSM resources such as Sketchy Pharm, First Aid, and USMLE Step 1 Qbank as their primary resource for pharmacology content. However, the majority of students want some form of synchronous session and interaction in order to help learn, solidify, and apply pharmacology. Of those students, nearly half preferred the interactive lecture format. The interactive lecture is an efficient and effective way to deliver pharmacology content and maintain student-faculty interaction in the virtual classroom.