DEVELOPING FLASHCARDS AS AN INNOVATIVE TEACHING TOOL FOR THE PHARMACOLOGY CLASSES

At the top of student-centered learning, professors have the constant challenge of incorporating innovative, active, dynamic and often creative learning strategies. The development of teaching material by the own students is a technique that can improve learning by stimulating the interest, effort and motivation of them. The main objective of the current strategy is favoring the autonomous work of the student, facilitating the learning of Pharmacology and benefiting the collaborative work in those subjects where it is carried out. For this purpose, this proposal of teaching innovation consists of using memorization or mnemonic cards (flashcards) created by the students themselves as teaching material that facilitates the learning of the numerous drugs that are studied in the subjects taught by our department. Each student will make a single flashcard. From a template prepared by the coordinator, each student will look for the relevant information requested in it in bibliographic bases of recognized prestige. Once finished, it will be sent to the tutor who will correct the possible flaws or inaccuracies of the teaching material. All memorization cards will be posted on a website for this purpose, upon presentation by students to their classmates in three seminar sessions. The project will be developed during the first semester of the 2019-2020 academic course at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Granada. The recipients will be students enrolled in three subjects taught in the first semester: Pharmacology I, Pharmacology III and Clinical Pharmacy.

To carry it out, 5 phases are proposed:
1) Preparation phase, which includes the design of the materials on which the students will work, with a meeting between the professors to elucidate the sections that should be included and elaboration of the template on which they will work (This phase is already completed).
2) Execution phase, in which the students will make the flashcards, the professor will correct them and upload them to the web, therefore all students have access to them.
3) Evaluation phase: of the process and the results of the project.
4) We will automatically generate a digital version of the cards. They will be included in a spaced repetition flashcard program which will show more frequently the most difficult cards than the most easy to remember, to optimise the learning of each student. It continuously adapts itself to the progression of each particular student to personalise and improve the study over time. The software is free and open source and available both for computers and smartphones.
5) Dissemination phase. The advantage of using this methodology compared to a traditional method, focused on the traditional master lesson, in which the student is a passive subject of the group that receives the information mainly through readings and teacher's exposure, is that through the use of flashcards, the student gets a ludic learning, which helps to deepen in the subject and increase the motivation.