Course:PHAR451/Instructor Resources
Instructor Resources & Guidelines
Course Coordinator: [mailto: janicem@mail.ubc.ca; Ms. Janice Moshenko] | 604-822-8091
Course Graduate Teaching Assistant: [mailto: atiqmzam@mail.ubc.ca; Mr. Mohammad Atiquzzaman ]
The Course
P451 is the third in a series of four required therapeutics courses delivered in the 2nd and 3rd years of the UBC undergraduate pharmacy curriculum. It is a 2-credit course focusing on endocrine, cardiovascular, renal, and hematologic therapeutics. P451 is offered in a coordinated fashion with P471 (Pathophysiology), P441 (Pharmacology), and P461 (Non-prescription Medicines & Self-care of the Patient). You can expect that the students will have already had the relevant pathophysiology and pharmacology sessions prior to your therapeutics session. Upon your request, we are happy to connect you with the individuals teaching the other sessions so you can clarify the depth/scope of the required therapeutics material.
The Students
Your target audience is 3rd year pharmacy (4th year university) undergraduate students. N= approximately 224. They’re keen, courteous and a capable group of mixed young and mature students, many with previous degrees. They are active learners, are prepared for the lectures and ask questions. Expect to be challenged.
Teaching Format & Tips
The format is 1 instructor on ~224 students in a lecture theatre. There are no additional tutorials or workshops. Sessions should be case-based. This can be achieved by using a simple case (or several) to illustrate the therapeutic principles that should be applied when managing a particular condition.
Provide students with learning objectives for your session.
Instructors are expected to use teaching techniques which maximize student engagement, and therefore, learning within the large-class context. Suggested strategies to avoid pure transmission (“lecturing”) format for sessions include:
- Use the classroom for hard stuff (e.g., difficult concepts, common/actual misconceptions, patient problem-solving). Move list-like and fact-oriented material outside the classroom (assign as pre-reading).
- Strongly root the session in realistic patient examples and problems which the students must solve.
- Use Team-Based Learning techniques to the extent possible (http://www.teambasedlearning.org/starting)
- Use frequent think/pair/share interludes (http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/interactive/tpshare.html)
- Start your session with a quiz to assess preparation, misconceptions, etc.
- Use polling software (www.polleverywhere.com) for interactive audience response.
- Create a Wiki page for your session (http://wiki.ubc.ca) and populate it with: objectives, links to trials, definitions, pre-readings, additional reading, other sites of interest, movies, etc, etc. (example: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:PHAR501/NaH2O). This is a great way to minimize sending PDFs all over. To share all your session materials, we just post the URL. Here's a TEMPLATE PAGE to start you off.
- LOTS of video tips on large-classroom teaching here: http://www.teaching.utoronto.ca/topics/teachingcontexts/explore/strategies.htm
Any time you have questions or need support to do something different or better, do not hesitate to contact the course coordinator and/or GTA.
Session Materials
We will not be printing handouts for any 3rd year courses. Students are free to view materials you make available to them (e.g., PDF of slides, or similar) on their own computers/tablets, or print them personally.
Your session materials must be posted 3 business days before your session(s) to allow students adequate time to prepare.
The course Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) will contact you 7 days before your session to provide instructions for submitting your materials for posting.
Copyright issues
"The SCC has decided that the fair dealing exception allows teachers to make copies of copyrighted works and distribute them to students as part of classroom instruction". You can review the "fair dealing" criteria, but posting PDFs of journal articles for teaching purposes falls well within it.
Prereading Assignments
You will be asked to specify a prereading assignment for your session. Usually this will be in the form of weblinks to the primary literature or PDFs of the articles themselves.
Course Text
There isn't a required textbook. See the Syllabus for what students are instructed regarding this.
Assessment
There is a module exam and a final exam for the course. The final will be in-class and online.
The Coordinator and/or GTA will contact you a couple of weeks before exams to elicit appropriate assessment questions from you.
Lecture Capture
All sessions taught in Pharmacy courses are automagically captured and posted for later review by students.
Room Amenities
All sessions take place in UBC PHRM 1101 in the new Pharmaceutical Sciences building.
First, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C55pm-LtIcs&feature=youtu.be In most cases, a Graduate TA will be in the classroom to assist you with basic AV support. If not, you can call the AV Specialist Vincent Leung at 604-827-1817, or the AV helpline at 604-822-9140.
The list of technological amenities in this room is long. Wireless networking, VGA and HDMI connections, document camera are available, as is a lot of other technology. The course GTA will attend most sessions and can provide basic technical support. A help-line to an in-building technical support person is available too. If you have special plans (e.g., using audience response systems, video conferencing, other), contact [mailto: janicem@mail.ubc.ca; Ms. Janice Moshenko] well in advance so technical support can be arranged.
Parking
Park in the Thunderbird Parkade. The course GTA will provide off-campus instructors with a parking pass at the beginning or end of your session. The parking pass works ONLY FOR THUNDERBIRD PARKADE. If you pay to park somewhere else, we are unable to reimburse you.
Thank you for your participation in P451!