Abstract:

The Pharmacy Faculty of the University of Valencia schedules are planned by the course coordinators at the end of the previous academic year for each course. However, there are some activities planned after publishing the schedules that students need or would like to attend. In these cases, changing an activity (lecture, seminar, tutorial course, etc.) to a suitable time frame for all students can be a very complicated task. All students have very complex schedules, which are different than those of their partners or the lecturers involved, especially if they combine subjects of different academic courses or if they combine the Pharmacy studies with Nutrition or food chemistry, which is a frequent situation, as these grades are taught in the same Faculty and provide the student’s with complementary scientific profiles.

In the case of this report, a lecture of Pharmaceutical Technology II (subject planned for the fifth year of Pharmacy Studies at the University of Valencia) was planned as only academic activity for a group of 98 students, a couple of days before the exam. The students decided to change the lecture to the previous week to optimize their schedule for learning before the final exams. There was low communication between all the students, as the group was quite numerous and about 20% of the participants had belonged to other groups the previous years. The representative of the student’s group shared his worries with me, the lecturer involved, and I decided to use the Doodle application, which allows each student to select from possible new dates the most suitable one for them1. The students were contacted via e-mail and encouraged to select among 5 possible dates fitting in their schedules. To facilitate finding the most suitable for everyone, they were told to select all possible dates and not only their preferred one, after clicking the appropriate link2. An appropriate time frame was given for voting (72 h).

6 h after sending the e-mail, 34 students had already voted for dates. 12 h before the voting time expired, the 98 students had voted. Only 4 students selected only one of the possible dates. Finally, the lecture took place in the most voted day, which only 3 students had not selected. After directly talking with those students, they decided to assist to the same lecture in one of the other three groups, which they were exceptionally allowed to attend to. Furthermore, the feedback of the students was very positive to the initiative, as they felt, according to their own words, individually recognized and encouraged to use this new tool for communication.

It can be concluded that, doodle is a very easy-to-use tool that can reach all students and is very suitable to successfully reach an agreement in exceptionally changing schedules of activities for heterogeneous numerous groups at high educational levels.

Keywords:

Doodle, schedule changes, higher education, Pharmacy, individual targeting.