Ep 55 Free Pharmacology Textbook Pros and Cons

Free Pharmacology Textbook Pros and Cons

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

I use a combination of a free textbook and a supplemental textbook in my pharmacology courses, but you can check it out the audiobook supplement I use to the printed/e-textbook here  https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacology-Audiobook/B09JVBHRXK?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-281667&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_281667_rh_us 

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Welcome to the presentation on pharmacology open educational resources. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go through a number of questions and talk about how open educational resources are good and where there’s some actual negatives that come along with it. But certainly, the idea that we’re trying to get less expensive materials to students is where we’re going to start.

Question one: What prompted you to use OER with your students? So a big trend that has come around is the ability to rent a textbook. This is a book that I used to use, Lenny’s Pharmacology for Nursing Care. It’s very good, very well written, it’s very comprehensive and you can rent it for thirty dollars for the semester which is great. I have a very reasonable price but you would have to pay probably about 110 dollars to own the book.

The issue with that is that when you are done with the course, you’re not done with the need for the content. So although you’ll have your notes and all of those things when it comes to taking the actual exam, the NCLEX, the nursing licensing exam, you don’t have access to this book anymore and you would have to rent it again for thirty dollars.

So having a book that is available after you’re done with the course is really what made it so that I could do this. So in a course and I’ll show you that we use the OER for half the course and then some other textbooks for the other half of it but having a reference that you can still get to afterward that really was was the driving force.

So probably good that I show you the actual book. Okay so this is the actual book, Nursing Pharmacology, Wisconsin Technical College System. This is the book that you can use for free but that was a primary driver is making sure that now if you take this class and you have this book, you still get it. You can still retain it through that time.

And the big thing is when you go look and see how much is the Kindle? 83 dollars. That’s relatively expensive for the students to pay for and although it’s nice to have the paperback in terms of actually looking things up in a book that is about a million words long, it’s just super nice to have that ability to use a find feature where something like a printed book would be okay well what chapter was it where did I see it? Very difficult to do.

How did you find the OER you were using? Question two: It’s pretty straightforward. I just put in Pharmacology OER. There’s really only one book that’s of this quality that’s available and it just popped up in the Wisconsin Technical System.

Question three: If using OER is using OER more work and if so why is it worth it? It is a little bit more work. It’s certainly worth it to make it more accessible to the students but let me kind of go through why it’s a little bit more work.

Let me show you how the book is set up and that’ll make me make it a little bit easier. You can download it, get a PDF of it but I’m going to use it in this way because it’s a little bit easier to get to everything.

So when we look at the contents and it’s going to be here on the left hand nav bar, it’s really well done. You’ve got one through ten so you’ve got all of these chapters. It’s relatively comprehensive in terms of getting those things that you would need for nursing pharmacology course.

It’s got an answer key to all of the critical thinking activities in there and there are quite a few of them but the big thing is that it’s tough to present so let’s go into kinetics and Dynamics okay so here’s the first one and it’s just okay this is what the learning objectives are and then you kind of go to the next one.

You know one and go into pharmacokinetics and so when you’re presenting something like this, it’s a textbook. You’ve got that but what you don’t have are ancillaries. And so ancillaries are Powerpoints and explanatory videos and things like that those you will have as you go through it and you can kind of see.Here is the corrected version of your text:

"Um, you know, there’s this moving graphic there. This is a little something for you. And then when you get to the learning activities here, which are generally in the back, you can see that there’s kind of a matching. But the thing is, is that it’s for lack of a better word, a little bit random in what it is. It’s 14 cards about what was going on through the chapters and there were 11 modules in it. So you’ve got a little bit of vocabulary there and then these are really good.

The light bulb moments are case studies which are very useful and helpful as well. But generally in a publisher book, you would have a significant number of these and you would have the rationales and here you only have the answers. So although you do have the answers at the end, it doesn’t really tell you why it’s the answer in tremendous detail. So although I think that the interactive activities and the critical thinking are great, the publisher is generally a bit better when it comes to giving Powerpoints and visuals and those types of things that you would need.

Oh, what do your students think of OER? Question four: Students are obviously happy to have a book that is available, accessible to them during the class and after the class and the fact that there’s no cost to them is key. So students are very much in favor of OER and are really kind of coming to expect that it’s going to be included as we’re kind of moving forward here.

Yeah, so as I mentioned before, the one big benefit that they don’t see with commercial textbooks is that they can retain the book afterward especially when it comes to a digital copy. So you saw that book although you could rent it for thirty dollars, the physical book, the actual Kindle book would have been about ninety dollars. So relatively expensive. So keeping that book for their licensing exam, that’s really the big benefit.

Okay question six: Does the OER allow you to update or change content if needed? I’m not aware of being able to change the content but the bigger issue is that there’s no point person. So with a publisher I can contact the publisher and say hey you know this is what I would really want in the book maybe you have a different book that does this but there’s really no one that I can talk to.

I know that it was done through a grant and there’s a project but not only can I not update it but I’m catching errors from time to time. I don’t know who to tell and that’s kind of a bit of a concern. So while my students I can clear the error let them know that it’s there I can’t actually remove it from the document and that’s a concern.

Question seven: What happens if a student needs to have a print copy of the OER? That’s actually relatively straightforward. That is available to them and I’ll show you the breadcrumb trail here. So while you need a printed copy if you wanted to print it you could print the whole PDF and all the pages but um you can and you have to do a little digging you can go to Amazon and find it here.

It’s a little bit misleading in that it’s a different color cover which makes it a Little bit difficult but OpenRN is the author and then you can find the book is the same. So there are a couple of copies of it, it looks like. But again, it’s not the easiest thing to find. So most are fine with the eBook but those that want to print book you can get it. But I’m not sure if this is print on demand where you know, are there really only four available or is this something that would just print as students want it. Alright, let’s move on to question eight which is what’s been the hardest part of using an OER.

And I think that that really comes down to where does it fit into the course and how many credits of book is it? So this takes some digging and this is where you really want to kind of get a little backstory on it and figure out who’s using it in what course. And so when we go to Chippewa Valley Technical College, we go to their course search and we go down and we find Nursing Pharmacology. This is course 543-103 and this is the real issue. It’s only a two credit class so that means that this book was written for a two credit class when nursing schools have courses that are from three credits to six credits.

Now that Pharmacology for Nursing Care, that’s a million word book. It can be used for any course like that but now we’re in a position where here DMACC, it’s a four credit class so I only have two credits of book in Nursing Pharmacology. So the question is how do I fill in the other half of it? And that’s where we have to go to a traditional book and what we do is use a general pharmacology book that’s going to fill in more details of a lot of the concepts and then also have the ancillaries make it a little bit easier.

But that’s really the toughest thing is that when you have a book that does not cover all the credits, you have to marry that with some other content. But again, it’s most important that you go to a course, find where they use it because you don’t really have a word count in the same way that you could just look at a physical book and say okay I know how much detail this is in. That Loney book has over a hundred chapters where this nursing pharmacology book has 10.

And although the chapters are very specific, as you get into a pathophysiologic class like gastrointestinal, there are other chapters. So let’s kind of look at the book itself when you go back and you see okay here’s the book and you say it looks like there are only 10 chapters but the way Lenny does it, it actually makes each of these individual pieces into a chapter.

So when you look at the number of chapters, you would say well this one actually if you count the content chapters, you’re looking at 11 chapters in kinetics another six chapters in legal ethical antimicrobial would then have quite a few actually it goes down to 21.

So really figuring out without a physical book and it’s a lot easier to do this with a physical book that you can put them side by side and say okay if this is two credits then what is three credits or what is four credits? So I think that’s one of the toughest things is making sure that you are satisfying the rigor of the course in terms of how much book you need.

Question nine: What advice would you give a colleague who is considering OER? OER is a lot easier for a class that you teach over and over again so we offer pharmacology fall spring summer so it’s very easy to say okay well this is a course I’m going to be teaching year round and it would be nice to know who else is doing this.

The big thing is that if you’re, I feel like a lot of us are reinventing the wheel and we’re starting from the beginning because we don’t really have a connection to it. So it would be nice if on the website somewhere we could just say hey I’m using it, this is my contact information so if you’re using it great, you know I’d love to get your information kind of see what you’ve done with it. And I’ll talk a little bit about one thing that I have done which is create a podcast with the critical thinking activities and talking through them giving them a lot more detail fixing errors and things like that.

But the big thing is if you’re going to do OER, make sure it starts with a course that you’re going to be teaching significantly fall, spring or multiple times because there will be an investment of time which is certainly worth it but that would definitely be the first step.

Question 10: What is the one thing you know now that you wish you have known would have known before you got started with OER? I think really the importance of ancillaries. There’s an expectation that an instructor is going to give their PowerPoints to the students and not having those PowerPoints is just a kind of a very difficult thing in terms of a starting point.

So I think it would have been good to get to a point where there would be like kind of a building semester where I could really think about okay well what are the key pieces here that we would want to use. And I found that rather than creating PowerPoints, I created podcasts and that was a really good place to go and they’ve evolved as I started doing them.

But part of the course has pathophysiology which is foundational for understanding pharmacology and some of the critical thinking activities are more pathophysiology than pharmacology. And so it’s just a matter of going through the book and kind of getting those pieces together as something that would be something a student would want.

And I just know that podcasts especially video podcasts where they can see everything would certainly be something that they would buy into. And here’s the podcast, you can see that it’s getting quite a few ratings and there are a lot of students that are getting a lot out of it. They’re all video OERs and although I just kind of started a little bit slow, I did kind of get through quite a few of them.

So I’m really extending the length of the time that you want to work on a project like this and having the okay I’m gonna do one small thing each time, kind of going with the I think it was BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits to make it a very tiny thing which is okay I’m gonna do one activity "Whereas when I first started, these I did like all the activities for the chapter and then I found that students really prefer that you like okay well I want to go back to just something very small. And so some of these are tiny so the antiarrhythmic mnemonic so you can go through the five classifications of the antiarrhythmics that’s seven minutes, it’s not very long at all. And then the cardiac interactive also not very long so I put that in there as well and then just a single case study for congestive heart failure took about 17 minutes.

So they can be extensive and really you want to think about drive time when you’re thinking about podcasts so 15 to 20 minutes at most. So that if they do have a long community that’s fine, they can listen to multiple episodes but when you’re talking about how long you know it should be if you’re putting the class upside down where you want them to listen to something and watch something first then you really want to keep to under that 20 minutes.

So GI pharmacology there were a number of case studies there as well and having it on a podcast makes it a little bit easier. It’s free to everybody kind of sticking with the Creative Commons license and all that. So Memorizing Pharmacology podcast, I started it with some things that I had done and kind of went into this OER to try to get through the book. A little behind with the episodes, last one was just after Christmas so hopefully I’ll be able to get the next chapter in.

But again these podcasts have been well received and it’s just kind of being able to use the material and to make it your own. But again when you talk about the amount of time it takes to do something like this, I’m really thinking about okay can I do this in a year rather than can I try to get this done for this semester is really a much better timeline in terms of how to do this.

Okay question 11: Will you continue using OER and if so why? So certainly for this course, I’ve put a lot of time into it and I feel confident in the book though again each year that book gets more and more dated and that’s a real issue. So who’s going to update it? Is somebody going to update it? When are they going to update it? I don’t really even know who to ask.

But the other thing is that because I’ve used OER in farm now we use OER in chem and we’re finding that when you look at what the publisher is doing and what we would prefer from the publisher those interactive activities and those platforms we allow the publisher to do that part of it. And then for us what we really want is okay is there a book that’s OER and there’s a couple in chemistry.

So not only am I continuing to use OER in this now introductory chemistry, I’m able to use OER for the students as an alternative to a very expensive print book but we do use the Publishers ancillaries.

So in terms of kind of a conclusion to all of this, I think OER does a good job of getting the textbook out there but when it comes to the ancillaries those types of things that are really engaging and allow the students to do really kind of neat things PowerPoints all those things those tend to be things that a publisher may do quite a bit better.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com. Again you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening thank you.

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com