One of the strategic goals of the College of Pharmacy is to move from teacher centered to student centered and from passive to active learning modalities. Within this context, over the past two years, faculty members incorporated flipped classroom sessions in their courses and made special effort to include and engage all students in the active participation during these sessions.
Dr. Ibrahim El-Sayed, Associate Dean- Academics is the chair of the curriculum committee and is leading the teaching and learning initiative that focuses on student centeredness and introduction of technology in teaching and learning. In this context, during the first week of November, he introduced “Team Based Learning” in his course “Sterile Dosage Forms” for Year 4 PharmD students. Students were informed in advance about the lecture topic and then, started self-learning and exploring the relevant information from assigned references from the library and other online resources. During the lecture (learning session), the students individually answered an online quiz on “Socrative platform” using their laptops/iPad. Then, they were divided into groups, with 5 students in each group, to answer the same quiz again but after an interactive discussion and in presence of the course coordinator, Dr. Ibrahim El-Sayed, as a facilitator. Finally, a brief explanation was given to the students to elaborate some critical points within the topic and to make sure that the learning outcomes were effectively achieved.
Dean Sherief Khalifa commented: We are very proud of this initiative and we applaud the effort of our faculty who are working hard to make their teaching more effective by ensuring it results into student learning. The importance of technology enabled teaching and learning cannot be overemphasized as the world is moving faster than we think to adopt technology in everything we do. Our students and graduate have to be ready for this new era!