Multi-method Active Learning Approach: improving the educational experience in Pharmaceutical Drug Development

Background: Improve educational experience, teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes remains one of the major educational challenges nowadays. Purpose: To determine the effect of organizing and teaching the Pharmaceutical Drug Development curricular unit using a Multi-method Active Learning Approach, MALA, as a novel teaching/learning strategy. Methods: MALA involved several different activities about pharmaceutical legislation, medicines production and validation process, Common Technical Document, and others, and the evaluation of this active learning approach was made in two ways: students’ performance (grades), and students’ evaluation regarding the curricular unit and the teachers’ performance. Results: Results revealed two main important aspects of the implementation of MALA: (i) the implementation of MALA showed high rates of students’ satisfaction regarding the curricular unit and teachers’ performance; (ii) student’s performance (grades) were very high, revealing excellent teaching/ learning results. Conclusion: The present study fostered the concept that the MALA- learning approach should contribute to knowledge- enhancing in the pharmaceutical practice and could encourage integration of the students' learning skills in the future career, thus stimulating the flexibility in learning.