Umm Al-Qura University
The main mission of the Curriculum Committee is to review and make recommendations on proposals for adding, removing, or modifying courses and programs offered by the College of Pharmacy.
The Curriculum Committee is now working on shifting the teaching delivered by the college from topics-based education to competency-based education. Since sciences are in continuous developing; memorizing lists of facts and data is probably no longer the ideal way to learn. Not only because an important part of those information would be outdated by the graduation time, but it also may not prepare tomorrow’s Pharmacists to practise and learn in an ever-changing environment. Competency-based education may be the answer. It is designed to provide the future pharmacist with skills they need, rather than solely large, prefabricated sets of knowledge.
The Curriculum Committee approved a set of 10 competencies that our students should gain upon their graduation. Theses competencies, which are adopted from the international health and pharmaceutical organisations namely WHO, ACPE, CAPE, GPhC, are: Learner, Caregiver, Manager, Problem-solver, Educator, Collaborator, Communicator, Leader, Researcher and Professional.
The Curriculum Committee reviewed all the courses currently taught in our college to see how these courses serve the adopted competencies. The Curriculum Committee agreed with each course coordinator on the required modifications to improve the their courses. Over the last two semesters, new teaching methods (e.g. PBL, CB...) and assessment tools (OSCE, Case Study...) have been introduced. The teaching style is also moving constantly from Passive Leaning where the students are expected to “record and absorb” knowledge to Active Learning where the role of the instructors is to creat a learning environment where the students can learn to restructure the new information and their prior knowledge into new knowledge, and how they can practice this new knowledge.
On the other hand, the Curriculum Committee is in advanced stages of negotiations with Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in order to develop our curriculum with them.
Curriculum development is a continuous process in which the efforts of staff, students and graduates are essential to produce a modern curriculum that meets the international standards and to equip our graduates with the competencies and skills they need in their future career.
Committee Members:
Curriculum Development is a continuous process that spans a variety of activities around the creation of planned curriculum, pedagogy, instruction, and methods to guide student learning.
Naturally, the development of the pharmacy curriculum at UQU started by assessing the market needs. That has been done by extensive consultation with the stakeholders, namely the potential employers (hospitals, national chains of community pharmacies, SFDA...), UQU graduates and our undergraduate students in both programs.
The curriculum committee then reviewed the pharmacy education outcomes required by the main international health and pharmaceutical organisations such as WHO, ACPE, CAPE, GPhC. The committee adopted 10 universal competencies that the UQU pharmacy graduate should achieve. Our future pharmacists should be Learner, Caregiver, Manager, Problem-solver, Educator, Collaborator, Communicator, Leader, Researcher and Professional.
Upon the agreement on the competencies set; specific outcomes for each competency were elaborated, same as proposed teaching methods and assessment tools. The whole courses were then reviewed individually to see to which degree these competencies are covered by the present curriculum. The committee recommended changes to the course coordinators to implement in order to make sure that all the competencies are covered by our curriculum. In the second stage, the committee asked the course coordinators to reduce the passive learning by at least 30 per cent. New forms of active learning were introduced this year.
Our plan for the next year is to introduce significant changes and development of the curriculum where the basic sciences are integrated with the pharmacy practice.
