Implementation of an online ethics course into a pharmacy curriculum

A Narrative Overview of the Effectiveness of E-learning in Pharmacy Education

“…These unique advantages clearly establish a role for e-learning within pharmacy education, but it is the disadvantages of e-learning that help to define what this role may be. In the vast majority of studies, participants did not prefer e-learning over faceto-face methods, and concerns exist around the impact of reduced face-to-face interaction [10,17,21,38,39,55,56,58,62] and the diminished role of faculty member [17,21,55,62]. Therefore, it appears that the current role of e-learning within pharmacy education may be as part of a blended approach, so as to supplement, rather than replace face-to-face interactions.…”

“…In both studies students completed pre-and post-course assessments and there was not a statistically significant difference between pre-and postintervention performance. However, DeMella et al, [62] did find that students felt more confident managing ethical dilemmas following completion of the e-learning intervention.…”

“…Studies also identified a number of advantages of e-learning, which include increased convenience [10,12,17,21,28,29,38,52,56], the ability to protect 'in class time' [20,33,35,50,55,57,63], the empowerment of students to take responsibility for their own learning [17,20,33,35,50,56,57,63] found the e-learning intervention to be effective in increasing the knowledge or skills of the participants. In 2 of the 3 studies that did not have a positive outcome, Weaver et al, [34] and DeMella et al, [62] examined the delivery of a blended health policy course and an online ethics course, respectively, to pharmacy students. In both studies students completed pre-and post-course assessments and there was not a statistically significant difference between pre-and postintervention performance.…”

“…Learning was also assessed subjectively, through pre-, mid-and post-intervention surveys in twenty-six (46.4%) studies [11,12,[14][15][16][17][18][19]23,25,29,30,35,37,[41][42][43]45,46,50,52,56,57,59,62,64] and all but two [19,42] of these studies reported that the e-learning intervention was effective. Taglieri et al, [19] investigated the effect of completion of online virtual patient cases on student performance and confidence in mock clinic visits.…”

“…Three (5.4%) [25,55,57] of the nine studies that reviewed blended learning methods, failed to assess the effectiveness of the e-learning intervention independently of the face-to-face teaching. Twenty-six (46.4%) studies [11,12,[14][15][16][17][18][19]23,25,29,30,35,37,[41][42][43]45,46,50,52,56,57,59,62,64] measured the effectiveness of e-learning intervention on the basis of self-reported data. These findings are therefore vulnerable to response bias as well as recall bias, when participants were required to make a post-intervention assessment of their pre-intervention skills, knowledge or confidence [65,66].…”