Pharmacy institutions, faculties and students have to prepare for a transition from a conventional system of teaching and learning methods to a digital form of instructing and understanding lessons for the future.
This is one of the major challenges the institutions have to face during their shift from traditional classroom system to a virtual classroom mode, according to Dr B Suresh, president of the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI).
The present online mode of teaching pharmaceutical sciences that happened to be during this COVID-19 pandemic-created lockdown period will turn out as the beginning of technology-based online education in the years to come. But students need to be welcomed back to the campus sooner or later, and during this short period of lockdown the ongoing online sessions will become an add-on to the customary education that students used to get in the campuses. Teachers, although they have to equip themselves for the virtual teaching mode, are silent warriors of pharmacy education as nobody is there to appreciate their hard work during this COVID era, the PCI president said.
Dr Suresh, who is also the Pro-Chancellor of the JSS deemed-to-be University in Mysore, was addressing a national level online academic conference hosted by the students’ forum of the Indian Pharmaceutical Association (IPA SF). The subject of the conference was, ‘Online Pharmacy Education – a Boon or Bane for students”.
