Abstract:

Society is demanding nurses who have an ability to collaborate, solve problems and make appropriate profession-related decisions. Educators should continue to pursue researching different teaching-learning methods with constructivist approaches that increase the student's competence in problem-solving and decision-making. Educators are urged to look beyond the traditional teaching model and attempt more innovative and active methods of teaching in the classroom.
Regarding Pharmacology teaching, one of the direct consequences of discovering new drugs is the constant increase of scientific information. This fact causes difficulties for university students, as there is not a realistic possibility of teaching all the available information to every learner. Teachers need to select the relevant information and only after that decide how to teach it.
Nursing students need adequate medication competence to provide safe and effective medication administration and management, which is an important component of registered nurses' responsibilities. In addition, nurses play a key role in patient education and supporting patients' adherence to their medication regimen. Medication safety is a global concern and, among others, factors contributing to medication errors include system failures and deficiencies in nurses' medication competence.
Blended Learning, the integration of face-to-face with computer-mediated instruction to provide a coherent learning solution, could be useful to face this challenge. In fact, there is some evidence that b-learning could be more efficient than the traditional classroom model: students achieved similar grades and showed higher levels of satisfaction with this kind of approach. The success depended on the effective integration of both procedures: online and face-to-face methodologies and entails a reorganization of the teaching and learning dynamics.
We present a collaborative learning strategy for teaching Pharmacology through blended-learning in the Nursing Faculty curriculum through an educational environment with the aim of making the learning of specific skills and competences in Pharmacology easier for the students, promoting the development of communication skills and interpersonal relations, allowing the student individual monitoring and continuous evaluation, encouraging greater student involvement in their own training, and working in certain generic and cross competences as implicit elements in the dynamics of work followed during the course. In this sense, we have tried to improve the effectiveness of the course and student self-learning engagement.
The design adds competence-based organization and outcomes-based learning to our teaching assignment at the University of Cadiz (UCA). The learning experience considers long-term group assignments, in-classroom activities and “anytime-anywhere” learning experiences using the UCA’s virtual campus. We attempted to get information from students and colleagues in order to analyze the learning experience for both usefulness and implementation in other Health Sciences courses or areas.
Both students and experienced professors considered this experience as highly satisfactory and now we have more information about which parts of instructive online environment we need to improve in the future.

Keywords:

b-learning, collaborative learning, nurse education.