Blog Description


Premises

During the last academic year, 2020/2021, the needs of online teaching made necessary to give up direct interaction with students or strictly limit it to a few occasions.
In this way, this
innovative teaching approach, called MedChemBlog, has been proposed in order to stimulate students to follow the lessons with greater interest and to take an active part in them.

Following the great success and students positive feedback recorded last year, in a perspective of continuity, we propose the MedChemBlog learning approach also for the current year, 2021/2022.

Hope you will enjoy it!

Organization

Taking advantage of the boundless amount of structural chemical information available on the internet, and the numerous ideas offered by both UMG Medicinal Chemistry courses, students following the course were asked to search for pertinent references to the topics covered each time.

Students expose the selected cues and insights sharing the relative page from their computer and encouraging discussion and interaction with the teacher and other colleagues.

This innovative teaching activity is implemented at each meeting, after the lesson presented by the teacher. The most relevant references (links) proposed by students are included, as supplementary teaching material, in the course pages on the University's e-learning platform.
Each link, considered suitable by the teacher, will be assigned by name to the student who proposed it and added it on the e-learning platform available to all those who follow the course.
In this way, we generate the
exclusive course blog of the current academic year.

Implementation

The student proposer provides a character string that summarizes the content of the link and the web address from which it comes. Duplications of the same information or links for different topics were not allowed.

The aim is not only to stimulate the participation of students during the course, but also to foster the development of their understanding of the molecular structures and mechanisms of drug functioning.

During the first lessons the teacher and the tutor illustrate how to search for references to be proposed on accredited and scientifically valid databases (Protein Data Bank, Drug Bank, PubChem and others).

At the end of the course, the most active students were adequately rewarded.