How Pharmacy Educators Are Using Social Media to Engage and Inspire Students

Alexis E Horace PharmD, BCACP, professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Louisiana at Monroe College of Pharmacy, and Jameshia A Below, PharmD, assistant professor of pharmacy practice, developed a unique project to bridge the gap between how students learn today and the subject of informatics. The goal was to make informatics fun and encourage students to be creative and innovative in developing new technologies to advance health care. By combining their love of social media, the educators used the TikTok platform to have students design informatics or medication safety-based technologies. The project aimed to increase student engagement, collaboration, and communication, moving away from traditional lectures. The benefits included better retention of information presented in short, engaging formats. Students worked in groups to film TikTok videos showcasing their innovative ideas, using filters, skits, and props.

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Q: What was the inspiration behind this TikTok assignment?

Alexis Horace: The inspiration came from trying to bridge the gap between our students and how they're learning information today, how they are seeking knowledge, even about pharmacy related topics, and, of course, like informatics, which in of itself, on the surface, sounds like very dry information, but how can we make informatics fun, and how can we encourage our students to dream a little bit, and how can we encourage them to be creative and think outside of box? Because ultimately, being creative and innovative helps with strategies for solving problems in the pharmacy profession. So combining our fascination with social media along with informatics, we came up with this project on having our students dream up informatics or medication safety-based technologies that could help push pharmacy forward in the future and then using social media. So we picked TikTok as our platform, primarily because it's a video-based platform that's easy for people to use, it's well known, and combining those together would create a fun experience for students to engage with one another, so it's just a different way to learn.

Q: What are some of the benefits of using social media, such as TikTok, for enhancing learning for students?

Jameshia A Below: So some of the benefits that we have found for using social media is really to include that it's going to increase our engagement with the students and also their collaboration with one another because we do have them to work as a group, and then also help with communication between the faculty, us as the instructors, and with the students and then just the overall participation. So our big push behind the social media is that we really wanted to motivate the students and increase their interactions, and it really allows them to get engaged, get out of their seats, so we're moving away from the traditional mundane lectures and getting into where they're having fun and they're also learning at the same time. We did see that, or we saw before we started the project, that some studies did show that students do capture information and retain it when it's given in like those small chunks format versus us just typically doing an hour-long lecture.

Q: Could you explain a bit about the project? What were the steps involved and the instruction to students?

Alexis Horace: The purpose of the activity was to encourage scientific thinking, problem solving, communications and then also public health awareness. The goal was for our students to design emerging informatics or medication safety. We call it IMS-based technologies to advance health care. There's influencers for everything. There's an influencer that's going to influence me on a new tea to lose weight, or a new head wrap for my hair, or something out there that's going to want me to buy into whatever is being sold. How do we encourage our students to become influencers or market pharmacy and the current in their technologies and what they can dream up? So we had a 3-hour lab that we used our students had some pre-assignment learning, which included PowerPoint presentation, and this PowerPoint presentation broke down future technologies into domains like robotics or medication delivery. So having those domains assigned to the groups ahead of time really helped, because then students could kind of get inspiration on what they wanted to create. Then after that, their group assignments were already made at the beginning of the year, and we asked our students to also make sure that they were familiarized with TikTok, or someone in their class was familiarized with TikTok. Then after that, we had class. So when class started, we had 15 minutes where we went through the PowerPoint really fast, but then we also reviewed our instructions, and we had to make sure our instructions were really clear, which included, what do we want from this video? What was allowed and what wasn't allowed? So things that were allowed was like a new idea out of the box. They could go anywhere in the classroom where they wanted to film. They could use filters, they could dance, they could sing, they could create skits, they could use props. They were allowed to just be as creative as possible, just as long as they didn't disturb other classes that were happening that day, and then after that, they had to film for at least about 60 seconds to 90 seconds. At first we're like, "oh 30-second videos." But the students were like, "No, that's not enough time." And so we were like, "Oh, you want more time. Okay." So they got to film for at least a minute and a half, and we really encourage the students to use the Tiktok app, and that is because it compresses the videos and it makes it easier to download, if they just did like iMovie or something like that Then it was like a film-sized video that we wouldn't be able to see, and then after that, students had maybe an hour, I guess, an hour and a half. So it's like 105 minutes to record their videos and make their infomercials, and then we spent the last part of class uploading the videos, and we watched them all, and it was just so much fun to see how creative students were. Even if they were a little silly, and even if some of them were a little bit cringe and some of them are, like, really funny, we were all able to just laugh and enjoy one another's creativity and what they came up with. Students were even just kind of like, let's do that video again. So it was just a lot of fun. Then our students were able to vote on their favorite influencer. So that's what we did. And there's some issues with students not wanting to post this on their personal social media, you know? And so we were able to come up with a way for them to download their video and then upload it into a folder so we could still watch all the videos. But it wasn't like tagged to them or not on their their socials.