Pharmatopia– research and development tabletting lab

Rapid changes facing the pharmacy profession recently led to a comprehensive review of the pharmacy course and the way aspects of the course are taught

Avatars (digital people) use the mixers and tablet press

Overview

As part of this review, the faculty looked at the role of laboratory classes, including the tabletting practicals.  Changes to thesepracticals were necessary for several reasons.

• Today’s pharmacists do not need to produce or test commercial tablets, but they need to know about tablet properties and how they affect the quality of the final product.
• Faculty tabletting equipment comprised just one 30 year old single punch press that had to be operated by staff due to occupational health and safety regulations. So students were merely observing and not actively participating in the process.
• And for security reasons surrounding the use of drugs, there was only one lactose formulation possible.
• There was also a strong administrative motivation for change. Tabletting practical sessions involved groups of eight students, with each group undertaking four three-hour prac sessions. Two tutors were required to supervise each small group and, with 240 students, this resulted in a timetabling nightmare.

In contrast, the virtual world is easy to access and use. It offers learning by participating and doing instead of listening and absorbing, and provides experiences not available in real life. For example, the virtual tabletting lab offers each student the opportunity to make several different tablets, with different ingredients, solutions and qualities.

Learning benefits

The major learning objective is for students to be able to demonstrate an understanding of the role of excipients in determining a tablet’s properties by formulating a tablet with defined properties. Eachstudent is given a specific tablet to make, for example, hardness = X, Y% disintegrated in 30 minutes, dissolution time = Z minutes. The student needs to formulate a tablet with these properties through iteratively changing excipient concentrations and testing resultant tablets.

Inside the testing area

Students (via their avatars) arrive at the island – Pharmatopia. From the main meeting place, they are directed to the tabletting lab (in the future, they will be able to choose from a range of activities). On arrival they enter the virtual reception area, where they are asked to put on a white coat, safety glasses and a hairnet before proceeding into the main lab. Also in reception is a map of the lab that they can study before entering. Inside the lab itself, which they access via an airlock, students select ingredients, move to a mixer and then go to a tablet press (both are exact replicates of commercial machines) to make their tablets.

The mixer and tablet press are 3D animated to show how these machines actually work, and students have a 360° view so that they can see what happens from every angle. At the end of the virtual tablet making, students each receive four jars of tablets, one for each of the four quality tests. They then move to the testing room, which replicates world standard testing equipment. Again, the instruments are animated and results are shownon LCD screens. These results can be cut and pasted into a Word document for retention. The results comprise many variables and students will be required to refer to their lecture notes to review formulations and repeat the process correctly. The island also contains a meeting room, where representatives from each of the partner pharmacy schools can log on to Second Life and meet there, via their avatars, in real time. This is faster and moreefficient than video conferencing.

A group of students from the Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Science will pilot the program later this year and it is planned to go ‘live’ with second year pharmacy students in 2009. Evaluation of the teaching and learning qualities is being conducted in collaboration with Monash’s Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, and student feedback will be used to improve the site.

The future

“There is so much we can do using online teaching tools. We are already looking at ways to combine pharmacy teaching with other health professions,” said Dr Ian Larson, senior lecturer and member of the project team. “For example, there could be a virtual hospital site that combines the skills of doctors, pharmacists and nurses, so that each cohort can fully understand the role the others play in patient health. The future possibilities for this type ofteaching are almost limitless.”