Pharmacy Students Discuss Learning Through Social Media Platforms

Alessia Reeves, Dylan LeBoeuf, and Taylor Hurst, all PharmD candidates from the University of Louisiana Monroe, discuss how leveraging social media platforms to supplement their traditional classroom learning. They describe using TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to find concise summaries of course topics, interactive explanations of complex disease processes, and even daily practice questions to prepare for the NAPLEX exam.

Image Credit: Rawpixel.com - stock.adobe.com

Q: Do you use social media to reinforce what you have learned in the classroom? If so, how are you using social media?

Alessia Reeves: I definitely do. I figure since I tend to always look on social media whenever I have downtime, I figure might as well try to reinforce what I've learned or learn something new, whether that be a video explaining something, or a post with a multiple choice question. In my opinion, it's a really easy way and fun to reinforce my knowledge.

Dylan LeBoeuf: I absolutely use social media to reinforce what's in the classroom. So the way I like to think about it is kind of that traditional lecture-learn format compared to that nontraditional learning format, which I like to think of as social media. So one of the main ways that I use social media is like YouTube and TikTok and things like that to reinforce those main topics. There isn't a lot of pharmacy-directed content out there. So what is out there is a lot of your pharmacology and what nursing and doctors and kind of what the other disciplines get for for pharmacology, instead of use that and to find out what they think and how they highlight pharmacology and take that in and kind of apply it is how it helps reinforce some of those main, I guess, topics that we get taught.

Taylor Hurst: Currently, I in the classroom, I do love to listen to our lectures and take notes, but I feel like as students, there's always things that we don't understand as clearly as the teacher may portray them to us. So I have always, even in my undergraduate courses, resorted to using, it all started out with YouTube, because on YouTube, you can find all these people something as simple as, like the path of physiology of a disease state that you don't understand, and so I would just look it up, and it would just tell me everything I need to know about it. It's a little more interactive. They use a lot more, I guess, like graffiti and drawings to show what is actually going on in these certain disease processes, and they can give you more acronyms to make things stick. So, it all started with YouTube, and then when TikTok came around. TikTok does the same exact things. Like, there's a certain people that I follow on TikTok, and they do different reviews of guidelines, and new guideline updates, and then in the disease state processes, or new drugs, things like that. Its interesting, because I could be scrolling on my Tiktok, like, just in my downtime, and it come across and like I'm kind of learning in my free time, so I always like to tie everything together and use it for school. Then also in my free time, when I see things and they pop up, it's like, "oh, I didn't actually know that." And if I didn't follow these accounts, like on my TikTok, or subscribe to them on YouTube, then I actually would never come across these things. On Instagram as well, they have a bunch of different accounts that are like NAPLEX readiness accounts. So like, what they do is they actually ask questions that you would see on the NAPLEX and it's like an interactive type thing, so it'll be like multiple choice, and you can click which one you think the answer is, and it'll tell you if it's right or wrong. So those are the platforms that I use, and I really enjoy doing that. I would say I revert to using social media platforms for finalizing my learning 85% of the time.

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

Alessia Reeves: I definitely use Tiktok and Instagram the most, and I really can't speak enough on how much I think they do benefit me. A lot of the pharmacy-related posts I do see are a nice, concise summary of things we learn in school, and I love that because in school, we're given lots of PowerPoints, lots of words on the slide, and sometimes it is nice to just see a nice overview of that topic. I also enjoy the aspect of social media, where I get to see pharmacists post about what they experience on their day to day lives in their job because it also helps me get a full picture of what they experience.

Dylan LeBoeuf: I think the platforms that I mainly stick with are Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube. I think those are kind of like the biggest social media platforms that I use for learning, and I didn't touch on this in the last question, but even like Instagram, there's accounts out there that post like daily pharmacology questions and daily NAPLEX questions that kind of reinforce some of those main topics while you're just scrolling. So I think those are the main 3 big ones, though.