Abstract:

The need for communicating basic health terms about public interest issues to the general population has been put in value during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. In this sense, students of health-related degrees should get through their academic career soft skills such as critical thinking and communication skills to be able to disseminate the latest health-related hotspots.

When implementing pedagogical alternatives to incentive the acquisition of soft skills in university degrees, two difficulties are often encountered. First, failure in students’ engagement. Second, professors do not feel confident about stepping out of their teaching comfort zone to adapt to students’ preferences in terms of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

The GEDITEFAR project is a multidisciplinary project aimed at incentivizing the learning of health sciences subjects via the generation of informative content by undergraduate students through challenge-based learning for dissemination in virtual environments. The project aims to use the dissemination channels preferred by students to overcome the traditional low participation rates and to benefit from a multidisciplinary environment to boost professors’ competences in the use of ICTs for teaching purposes.

The aim of this work is to present the results from the implementation design phase of this project.
First, a survey was launched to 3rd, 4th, and 5th-year students of the Degree in Pharmacy and Double Degree in Pharmacy and Human Nutrition and Dietetics at Complutense University of Madrid to know their preferred social media and their self-perceived current communication skills. Second, a multidisciplinary seminar was organized with professors in Pharmacy, Computer Sciences and Linguistics involved. The seminar dealt with the created virtual environments (blog and social media) based on students’ responses, and with the informative style in these environments. Then, another survey has been launched to the professors in Pharmacy involved where they evaluated the impact of the seminar on their ICTs skills to face the project.

For the students’ survey 87 responses (19.6% response rate) were obtained. Instagram (75.9%) and Twitter (69%) were the most popular social media for dissemination of informative contents over Facebook or LinkedIn. Moreover, most students already had a profile in both (89.7% and 72.4%, respectively). Students scored the importance of dissemination and their current communication skills as 4.5±0.6 and 2.9±1.1 out of 5, respectively.

For the professor’s survey 8 responses (100% response rate) were obtained. Analogously to students, professors scored the importance of dissemination as 4.5±0.5 out of 5. Due to their previous low familiarization rates with the virtual environments selected by students (2.1±0.8, 2.1±1.4 and 2.1±1.3 out of 5 for blogs, Instagram and Twitter, respectively), they perceived as positive both the multidisciplinary seminar and the specific material made available based on their queries during the seminar (i.e., an informative style guide and examples of posts to be distributed among the students) to boost their ICTs skills and implement the project.

In conclusion, the project has been designed to meet the expectations of both students and professors. The blog with the post examples has been created (geditefar.blogspot.com) and so have the Instagram and Twitter profiles to disseminate its contents (www.instagram.com/geditefar, twitter.com/geditefar).

Keywords:

Challenge-based learning, ICTs, pharmacy, outreach activities, multidisciplinar environment, blog, Instagram, Twitter.