Redesign of pharmacology course for optometry

PHAR3306 Pharmacology for Optometry is a 6-UOC third year course offered to students at the School of Optometry and Vision Science. With about 100-130 students, the course consists of ~ 32 lectures, 10 tutorials and 5 practicals. In 2019 the course received a low myExperience course score (3.67) and teacher score (3.33). In response to this situation, as the convenor I led a course review by performing a root cause analysis through curricular mapping, evaluating student feedback and consulting with colleagues in our Department. A number of issues have been identified as the possible underlying causes, including the overlapping of the content with another clinical course recently started by the School of Optometry, clarity of assessments and providing more feedback. Subsequently I led the course redesign including the development of new course learning outcomes (CLOs) that align with the program learning outcomes, new resources, learning activities and assessment tasks that are designed to be aligned with the CLOs, such as improved Moodle site, additional online lessons, new tutorials. The impact of these measures include achieving a good class result on par with other pharmacology courses,  much-improved student satisfaction (course score 4.87; teacher score 4.95), reflected in the positive comments in myExperience report  - "This was one of the most well organised courses..", "Overall a super well organised course, with insightful content and actual fun assessments, challenging but appropriate tests like midsem and quizzes", "The best element of studying online: group tutorials and online labs; lots of resources, some great online resources (e.g. the online learning modules, being able to do lab online, well-conducted tutorials), an amazing job of creating an online environment; the course convenors, weekly updates were great".