Students in pharmaceutical education have accustomed to passive knowledge transfer, making it difficult to arouse the motivation for issue analysis and real-time participation. Furthermore, the COVID-19 outbreak presents additional challenges for educators8. In the case of students, a lack of sufficient planning, monitoring, and communication may lead to a reduction in motivation to learn at home9. The involving of active teaching styles with collaborative learning can carry out the excitement of idea collision and be capable of integrating students' cultural settings10. At the same time, the great majority of Chinese college students prefer watching films with bullet-screen remarks because of their subculture context, minimal limitation, high immediacy, and, most importantly, "social viewing" characteristic11. Young people feel that the bullet screen will assist them in achieving self-expression and self-identification. These characteristics of bullet screen correspond well to the needs of educational reform, but it has seldom been applied to the educational field. Therefore, we supposed that, by using the bullet screen pursued by the post-90s and post-00s to assist the classroom teaching, students could be better liberated from the serious and restrained traditional classroom atmosphere, and the classroom interaction could be greatly improved.
In this study, 111 pre-clinical students used the bullet screen classroom. 55 of them majored in clinical medicine, while the remaining 56 majored in nursing. In medical education, we evaluated the essential features, instructional effectiveness, and recreational value of bullet screens. We also investigated how specialties influenced the variable characteristics. Our investigation results preliminarily verified the role of bullet screen in medical education. In accord with the Chinese social investigation, students found the interactive process realized by the bullet screen really interesting (4.34±0.68). They can immediately express their opinions of theoretical learning through this interaction (4.08±0.84). Thus, the bullet screen could indeed improve classroom interaction (4.16±0.71) and stimulate students’ in-depth thinking (3.91±0.86). However, the interaction was far from enough. Students still had not enough idea to participate and their critical thinking ability needs further exercise. Besides, students majored in nursing have even less subjective initiative. These phenomena informed teachers that, more elaborate course design is needed to further arouse students’ enthusiasm and thinking. Overall, we determined that the bullet screen classroom was well-liked by students and had a positive impact on improving classroom engagement and encouraging students' self-expression. In view of all these benefits and high acceptance, we considered that the bullet screen could be popularized to a wider range of occasions. We've also identified possible improvement paths for better integrating this technology into classroom teaching.
The specific application of bullet screen in pharmacology education
Learning requires chances for practice and discovery, as well as time to reflect "in your brain" and communicate with others12. A series of appropriate interaction questions may lead to students being involved with the issue, giving them enough time to think and communicate, which has a direct impact on the quality of the outcomes. Turning theory into practice, we have explored several interactive modes and cases, which may be suitable for the bullet screen in pharmacology education. First, to introduce the topic and arouse students' attention, teachers might ask some pre-planned short yes or no questions at the start of class. For example, to keep on a diet or to develop diabetes (hypoglycemic drugs), to enforce healthy routine or to suffer heart failure (anti-heart failure drugs), to keep slim or to save live (glucocorticoids). The open discussion can immediately catch students’ eyes and stimulate their enthusiasm to participate in the classroom. Second, during the class, clinical cases could be used, and teachers can ask some questions on this case, for example, whether the patient is seriously ill, whether he/she needs certain medication, whether the medication is rational according to the condition. Under the circumstances, bullet screen can allow student to think independently and each air his own views without worrying about others’ judgement. Third, after explaining the keynote and difficulty of variable mechanisms and adverse reaction, for example, the medication time of glucocorticoid, the effect of digoxin on the myocardium oxygen consumption, teachers can use bullet screen to checkout students’ mastery degree. Teachers can better recognize students' thinking modes and misunderstandings of specific problems by viewing real-time bullet screen replies, allowing them to change their interpretation to help students acquire the knowledge. Finally, at the end of the class, teachers can post enlightening questions, so that students could further approach the topic. For example, how to improve the application of insulin, whether the application of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors would influence the prognosis of COVID-19 infection, whether heart transplantation of pig could solve the problem of end-stage heart failure. Bullet screen is beneficial for this brainstorm, through which students’ divergent thinking capacity could be trained. Besides, bullet screen allows students to wake up their cognition and cause resonance. Also, some conventional multiple-choice question can be posted to review the course content.
With the help of bullet screen, students can get rid of the constraint of traditional speech pattern, and teachers can give feedback in time. Thus, teaching and learning can come into a virtuous cycle of interaction.
Current problems and room for improvement of bullet-screen classroom
Firstly, although introducing the bullet screen into classroom could improve classroom interaction, we found that the interaction was still insufficient. Students’ in-depth thinking could be stimulated by using bullet screen, but it needs teachers’ excellent guidance and question-and-answer design. Therefore, teachers should not only expand the scope of knowledge reserve, but also adjust to changing circumstances. At the other extreme, if teachers let students release their own ideas with abandon, the teaching rhythm will be seriously disturbed and the teaching objectives could not be achieved. Hence, teachers should also properly grasp the use limit of bullet screen. In a word, the bullet-screen classroom will demand more from teachers, but the following great influences deserve it.
Secondly, this classroom mode has its scope of application. It is not suitable for the course containing numerous theoretical knowledge, which needs elaborate explanation and leaves little divergent thinking. But in flipped classroom or a massive open online course (MOOC), the bullet screen may play a more important role. Students could explore, supplement, criticize, etc. by themselves13. Also, we found that, in the courses containing more plot, unknown and exploration, for example, those concerning drug design and development, the bullet screen could inspire students’ creativity to the maximum and thus help them to explore the unknown. It remains to be seen if the bullet screen will be better appropriate for these new classroom formats in pharmaceutical education.
Besides, the bullet-screen software should make some adjustments. Young people enjoy the anonymity feature of traditional bullet screens, so that they carry few consequences, and people feel free to express themselves without having to worry about judgment. But the current bullet screen software used in classroom could not hide the profile picture when showing comments. This point has troubled many students, as they have social phobia to be recognized when making comments. In addition, the operation procedure should be optimized to be more convenient.
Limitations
There are some limitations to consider when interpreting these results. First, this study is a single-center analysis, which will limit broader generalizability to other institutions. Since Shanghai Jiao tong University School of Medicine is one of the best medical college in China, whether the bullet screen could also work well in an inferior college remains to be discussed. Second, the sample size was not large enough and therefore we could not analyze students’ perception by age, gender, grade, etc. We only analyzed the differences based on their specialty. This limits our ability to understand the potential effects in different student population. Finally, we focused solely on students’ experience, but paid little attention to teachers’ opinion. Bullet screen is popular among young people, whether older teachers could accept and adapt to this mode needs further research. Teachers are the orienteer of the classroom. It needs further investigation of teachers’ evaluation to better improve this model of teaching.