Abstract:

The Faculty of Pharmacy (FFUL) in collaboration with the e-Learning Lab from University of Lisbon, Portugal (UL) developed, in recent years, a blended learning Postgraduate Course in Advanced Cosmetology.

The main goal of this course is training specialists in cosmetic products subject: from regulation, formulation, stability, manufacturing and testing. This course is preferably addressed to professionals but pharmacy students (last years) are also accepted.

The objective of this article is to demonstrate that innovative e-assessment tools used in this type of courses are fundamental to guarantee the amplification and enhancement of trainee’s knowledge and skills as well as to evaluate the quality of the course’ design, content and implementation process and therefore to gathering relevant data for improvement of its future editions. Two new online activities were included in the 3rd edition (2018) to assess the learning concepts previous taught in virtual classes.

1) "Cosmetic Information file" - which is a mandatory regulatory requirement on the part of the person responsible for placing the Cosmetic Product on the European market. It is a document with some complexity and difficult to implement in an on-line course.
2) "Virtual Emulsion Factory" - is an exercise transversal to all the themes of the course that obliges the trainee to reflect on the cosmetic product from legal requirements, to development, to manufacturing, to quality control, stability and claims to be labelled.

In this way, a video was created for the Cosmetic Information file explaining all the steps and elements that should be included in it, together with the respective complementary documentation, as well as a quiz on the subject matter with its automatic feedback.
Regarding the "Virtual Emulsion Factory", it is a sequential activity, developed in several modules and in which elements and questions were presented that included all the themes taught in the modules. Once again, the knowledge of the trainees was evaluated through quizzes with automatic feedback. Besides this theoretical component, based on a practical example of producing an emulsion (cream) in a virtual factory, the production of the product was carried out by the trainees in the face-to-face session that took place in a laboratory in the FFUL.

The integration of these new elements meets the needs of students and allows flexibility for each to build their models. The quality of this course was evaluated using E-learning in Capacity Building Check (ECBCheck) and the results showed high satisfaction rates in all dimensions, being that the program content was the one that presented higher values ​​(mean = 4.38, on the 1-5 scale).

The results so far obtained allow the demonstration of the use of new active e-assessment tools proved to be relevant for assuring the excellence in this blended learning course developed in this pharmaceutical post-graduated course.

Keywords:

b-learning, Pharmacy, e-assessment tools.