LETsPharm: Learning Enhancement Tools for Pharmacology, Pharmacy and More

Learning about how the human body interacts with drugs lies at the heart of pharmacology, which is an essential subject in any health sciences curriculum. Owing to the content scope and conceptual complexity of pharmacology, it is not uncommon to find students getting discouraged or overwhelmed in the learning process. To improve student learning experiences of pharmacology contents, coursewares have been developed and implemented across various programmes at HKU. These learning enhancement tools for pharmacology (LETsPharm) comprise standalone coursewares using different modalities to account for diverse learning strategies of our students. Students may use the coursewares at their convenience and obtain formative feedback on their learning progress. In this seminar, I will show examples of LETsPharm including gamified learning modules and a cross-referencing platform that are available to BPharm students. Construction of these coursewares may be customised to allow usage data curation on learning management systems e.g. Moodle. Course teachers may capitalise on the data and refine teaching strategies or develop new coursewares. While currently launched as a collection of discrete interventions to bolster student motivation and learning effectiveness, LETsPharm is envisioned to evolve into a comprehensive, integrated hub of learning resources that expand to other core subjects in the BPharm programme. The “LETs” model of coursewares may also offer a practical framework for developing educational toolkits in other disciplinary areas.