Abstract:

Introduction:
Social medias (SM) are undoubtedly a useful tool to reach many diverse people, where young people are immersed, in fact, university students spend a lot of their time on SM as a part of their daily lives. Some of the SM, such as Instagram, might afford students and professors multiple opportunities to improve learning methods because they offer many interactive tools of communication. However, part of this population is still reluctant to use it. All these reasons led us to set up an institutional Instagram account where diverse quiz-type questions related to physiology were posted regularly to have continuous feedback on how our students progress in physiology subjects. Simultaneously students do a self-assessment of their knowledge of physiology. The aim of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of SM to increase physiology knowledge in the students enrolled in physiology subjects from different courses at the University of Seville, School of Pharmacy by using quiz-type questions.

Methodology:
The activity was intended for students of physiology subjects taught in the degrees of Pharmacy, Optics-Optometry or dual Pharmacy&Optics-Optometry during the first semester of 2021-2022 academic year. The subjects were: Cellular Biology and Histology (CBH) imparted in first-year, Human Physiology (HP) in second-year and Pathophysiology (PP) in third-year. Regularly, quiz-type questions related to all these subjects were posted on our Instagram account (@fisiofarma_us) using the ‘Instagram stories’ tool. The number of interactions and the participation were analysed per subjects and compared with the final subject score.

Results:
The Instagram account reached more than 700 students. Around 140 questions were performed, with a mean of 343 views and 147 actively replies per question. Most of the participation and the better results came from questions related to PP (75%), followed by CBH (15%) and HP (10%). Moreover, students from CBH and HP failed more (~10% and ~5% higher than PP, respectively). Therefore, students from PP subject got higher final course score (20.8% pass, 40% remarkable and 26.4% outstanding marks) than in CBH (67.6%, 14.1% and 4.2% respectively) and HP (60.31%, 29.3% and 1.2% respectively). Interestingly, the students with the highest scores in each subject had participated in the activities done by the Instagram account. Also, a survey launched to the students revealed that 96% of the students considered the quiz questions on Instagram a useful tool to learn physiology and understand the lessons.

Conclusion:
The use of SM such as Instagram improves the knowledge of Physiology on the students, which is reflected in their better grades. All these results together support its regular use during the course as an effective educational tool that positively can improve the university students learning. In addition, third-year students are more involved in innovative educational activities than sophomores and freshmen, possibly due to their greater knowledge in physiology-related subjects.

Keywords:

Physiology, pathophysiology, e-learning, Instagram, pharmacy, optometry.