Blog Description

A qualified teaching method is hard to achieve without traditional classroom lessons. For learning purposes, students need to interact and influence each other, like being part of an osmotic process. They need to learn in a stimulating environment, developing the ability to manage conflicts and to compare opinions. How can this be possible during a pandemic? In an innovative distance learning experiment, students have been involved in significant changes to traditional teaching methods, forced to reinvent themselves and give up face-to-face interactions. General Medicinal Chemistry and Medicinal and Toxicological Chemistry I courses at Magna Græcia University of Catanzaro (UMG) accepted the pandemic call for challenge by renewing their teaching approach, trying to re-establish the sense of community jeopardized by distance learning. Students have been involved in the creation of a multimedia tool, called “MedChemBlog”, an innovative distance learning experiment. The aim was to improve the understanding of the chemical structures and drug molecular mechanisms of action, in a unique constructive fashion provided by scientific websites and databases, e.g., Protein Data Bank, DrugBank, and PubChem. In this way, students have been involved in the creation of the course’s blog, their “MedChemBlog”, revealed as a collector of “food for thought” for present and future students. 

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, 2022/2023.

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.