Abstract:

During the academic year 2022-2023, we carried out the Innovation and Improvement of Teaching project entitled "Clinical cases as open educational resources to foster meaningful learning of General Pharmacology". The main objective was to develop a handbook containing pharmacotherapeutic cases as an Open Educational Resource (OER). The cases were specifically tailored to the contents of the General Pharmacology course that belongs to Degree in Pharmacy and Double Degree in Pharmacy, Nutrition, and Dietetics at Complutense University of Madrid. These clinical cases were first elaborated by students of this subject, based on real clinical cases close to their personal experiences and, further reviewed by their course supervisors.

This project was developed in several phases:
- Phase I: Compilation and selection of clinical cases based on the drugs and their therapeutic indications, followed by their adaptation to the curricular content of General Pharmacology. In this phase, a total of 15 clinical cases were selected and grouped into three main categories:
(i) Pharmacology of the Peripheral Nervous System (9 cases);
(ii) Pharmacology of Cell Mediators (2 cases), and
(iii) Pharmacology of Neuroendocrine Axes (4 cases).
- Phase II: uploading of clinical cases as OER. We wrote a handbook containing the clinical cases and published it as a free access OER currently available at the following web address: https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/76878/1/Manual%20casos%20cl%C3%ADnicos%20farmacolog%C3%ADa.pdf.
- Phase III: Implementation of the clinical cases as a learning tool for General Pharmacology in a pilot experience. A group of students participated in solving the clinical cases and preparing supporting teaching material (podcast, poster, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) to be used by their peers as well as by their supervisors.
- Phase IV: Evaluation of the activity. For this last phase, a survey was designed to gather students' opinions about the level of satisfaction obtained by using the clinical cases in their learning process of General Pharmacology contents.

The survey was created using Google Forms and consisted of 7 questions. The students had access to it by the Virtual Campus. The survey was completed by 63 students. A significant 75% of the students found that analyzing a clinical case was very useful for learning General Pharmacology. Furthermore, almost all students agreed that the clinical cases promoted the integration of the wide and complex theoretical content of General Pharmacology, which is of great interest to them. It is also worth noting that 86% of the students strongly agree that confronting the challenge of working with the clinical cases was a valuable teaching tool not only to acquire knowledge but also to obtain different competences such as ethical-professional commitment, ability to analyze, integrate, apply and transfer knowledgeuseful for their future professional development. Finally, to improve the implementation of this activity in future academic years, the students suggested that the incorporation of seminars and teamwork would significantly enhance the learning experience.

In conclusion, this project provides, for the first time, an open-access online handbook of clinical pharmacotherapeutic cases that serves as a teaching tool to improve knowledge and competencies acquisition in General Pharmacology. Furthermore, being an OER ensures the systematization and equal access to pharmacology resources.

Keywords:

Pharmacology, open educational resource, knowledge transfer, clinical cases handbook.