Student Perceptions of a Modified Flipped Classroom Model for Accreditation in a Pharmacotherapeutics Course

The flipped classroom (FC) educational model, with specific modifications, may better prepare pharmacy students to acquire many of their missing key competencies. A modified partially-flipped pharmacotherapeutics classroom with pre-class-based online access to a comprehensive pharmacy education database was adopted to evaluate its impact on promoting student perceptions and to cope with international accreditation requirements. The teaching paradigm "partially-flipped" consisted of a pre-class orientation where groups of students were provided with different topics and an exclusive pharmacy database access, with no passive instructor-based pre-recorded lectures. In-class time included didactic instructor-based conventional lectures about foundational curricular topics, followed by flipped student-presentations about the rest of topics. Student perceptions were collected through end-of-course evaluation forms and voluntary narrative feedback. Students were satisfied with the availability of different updated original pharmacotherapy resources and the acquisition of critical thinking, information-researching, and peers-education competencies. However, they were dissatisfied with the presentations quality of some of their peers, and the overloaded content of numerous topics included in the summative assessments. In conclusion, this qualitative study addressed some accreditation competencies that were successfully perceived as promoted student satisfaction, engagement, and raised proficiency. This might help implementing a pharmacotherapeutics competency-based framework more specific to the region using such inquiry-based blended learning approach.