ABSTRACT
Advances in pharmacy practice have transformed the role of a pharmacist from traditional dispensing to more patient-centered care practices. Apart from the traditional dispensing practices, pharmacists are currently assigned to provide pharmaceutical care services focusing on identifying medication-related problems, taking a medication history, patient interviewing, and designing an evidence-based care plan. The advancement of the pharmacist's role to be part of the health care team to maximise the health care provided to the patient should be met with restructuring the pharmacy education and assessment from being focused only on medicine compounding, selling, and dispensing to include pharmaceutical care provision. Undergraduate pharmacy education has changed tremendously over the years, evidenced by the shift from a customer-based approach to a patient-centered approach using different clinical learning and examinations models such as Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). OSCE exam is considered a powerful and valuable tool for evaluating pharmacy students' clinical performance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmacy education and examination are globally affected. Many pharmacy schools are confronting surpassing challenges to sustain education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global experiences of academics and healthcare instructors in delivering emergency remote teaching, ensuring purposeful experiential pharmacy student placements, communicating and supporting the displaced or isolated pharmacy students are considered an accelerating opportunity for new models of pharmacy education. Therefore, this chapter aims to have an overview of pharmacy education during the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges to online pharmacy education, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pharmacy learning and education. Also, to have an overview about conducting OSCE clinical examination during COVID-19;the online OSCE exam preparation, set up, implementation, and assessment during COVID-19. Finally, to describe what can happen in the future to the online pharmacy student clinical education, OSCE assessment, and examination. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The study explores the impacts of fear emotions on technology adoption by teachers and students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobile learning (ML) has been considered an educational, social platform in private and public higher education institutes. Since several fears are connected with COVID-19, this study's key hypotheses are related to how COVID-19 influences Mobile Learning (ML) adoption. Educators, teachers, and students may face some common types of fear in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, such as fear of losing social relationships, fear of educational loss and failure, and fear because of the lockdown of the family in the prevailing circumstances. Different theoretical models, named Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), are combined to develop an integrated model for this study. The proposed model was analyzed with the development of a questionnaire survey. The survey served as a data collection instrument to collect data from students of the University of Sharjah in Sharjah city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Three hundred twenty undergraduate students participated in the study. The collected data was evaluated using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The significant predictors revealed by experimental results included perceived fear, perceived ease of use, expectation confirmation, satisfaction, and perceived usefulness, explaining the intention to use the mobile learning platform. According to our study, teaching and learning can be benefitted to a great extent by the adoption of mobile learning (ML) during this pandemic for educational purposes;however, this process may be negatively affected by the fear of future educational results, fear of losing social relations and fear of stressful family situations. Therefore, appropriate student evaluation may be conducted to overcome the emotional distress caused by the pandemic effectively. © 2021 by the authors;licensee Growing Science, Canada.