Award-Winning Capstone Course
TURNS CLASSROOM “LABS
INTO
OF INNOVATION”
Thanks to a group of creative educators, a core sequence of the UIC Pharmacy curriculum now ends with a bang — a capstone course that earned last year’s Frederick P. Siegel Innovative Teaching Award. The college’s PDAT (pathophysiology, drug action, and therapeutics) sequence now culminates with PDAT 10, designed by a working group in the college’s Phase 3 curriculum-revision project: Drs. Keri Kim, PharmD ’03, MS ’10; Mike Koronkowski; Kirsten Ohler; Renee PetzelGimbar, PharmD ’04; Tiffany Scott-Horton, MHA ’19; and Jeffrey Mucksavage. With Dr. Eljim Tesoro, Mucksavage coordinated PDAT 10’s first session in spring 2019. “I was excited,” Mucksavage said about the award. “I thought it was nice that the college recognized this capstone course. Capstone courses are not something that the college had done recently.” In establishing a capstone, the course designers wanted students to bring together knowledge from multiple previous courses and practice clinical pharmacy in complex cases. “The idea was not to teach new material but to refresh and apply a lot of the information that they had already received … and really giving the students hands-on experience,” Mucksavage said. The course creators aimed for, and the award recognized, four main avenues of innovation: course management, instructional design, technology, and testing.
DR. KERI KIM
16
| pharmalumni.uic.edu |
D R . M I K E KO R O N KO W S K I
SPRING 2020
“LABS OF INNOVATION” PDAT 10 employs a team of 50 instructors, distributed among a five-block course structure: three blocks of advanced medicine, one geriatric, and one pediatric. In each block, teams of faculty devised exercises and assessments for randomly assigned disease states. Those blocks, Mucksavage said, serve as “laboratories of innovation” for activities and assessments. The blocks can also respond in real time to the latest pharmacy news, he said.
COMPLEX CASES Within those blocks, the instructional design pushes practicing clinical skills. Students engage in patient assessment, clinical decision-making, and modifying processes for complex, multidisease states. “So we’ll have a patient with hypertension that has a history of chronic kidney disease and they also have diabetes, and they come into the emergency room with an asthma attack,” Tesoro said. Discussion is key. “These classes are not your traditional didactic classes with a lecture and slides. A majority of them are group discussions between students … and faculty,” Tesoro said, so students hear a variety of perspectives on clinical problem solving.
D R . J E F F R E Y M U C K S AVAG E
DR. KIRSTEN OHLER
