COVID-19 challenges in organising teaching at a faculty of pharmacy

Abstract

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. We come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small country in western Balkans. Our Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Sarajevo was opened in 1973, but from then on there was no kind of online teaching. So when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and when the university decided to stop all kinds of ‘inclass’ teaching (12 March 2020), we were faced with something new. We work at the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, where we teach regular courses on ‘Drug Formulation’ and ‘Industrial Pharmacy’. Students take classes in these subjects in the seventh, eighth and ninth semesters. The exercises are practical and last several hours. On 25 March 2020, classes in the lecture hall were suspended until further notice by the decision of the Senate of the University of Sarajevo, and then we realised that we must embark on the adventure of organising online classes. We carried out short research on available online teaching platforms to find basic information on the platform’s capabilities, identify their advantages and disadvantages, and check their commercial prices. We studied the following platforms for online courses: Google Meet, Adobe Connect, Zoom and BigBlueButton, and the following platforms for online examinations: Exam. net, Virtualx, Google Forms, Skillsbook, Papershala, Edbase, Kaldin and TCExam. After examining the possibilities of the available online teaching platforms, we agreed that Zoom and Google Meet provide the best results for running online courses. Adobe Connect, Blackboard Collaborate and BigBlueButton work on the same principle, but professional versions of these platforms were quite unaffordable to us. The results for the online examination platforms are summarised in table 1. Given the security and price of the platforms, we concluded that Exam. net currently meets our criteria, but that it would be necessary to use two platforms simultaneously during the examination, one of which would allow an established video connection with students during the examination (eg, a combination of Exam. net and Zoom). Students accessed the examination platform from their laptop while simultaneously established a video connection with the teacher on their mobile device. At the end of the semester, we conducted an online survey in which 60 (70.93%) of 86 students participated, and for 98.4% of the students this was their first online learning experience. Although it is assumed that current students (digital natives) have adequate information and communications technology competence, they differ in their computer and information literacy as they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Of the students, 21.3% had technical difficulties (ie, unstable connection). One of them said she/he has problems with misunderstanding from parents who required help with housework at the time of the lecture because she/he comes from the countryside. Of the students, 75% were satisfied with the conducted online classes at our department. Onethird found it easier to follow theoretical lectures online. Here are some comments from the students: