Endocrine Pharmacology Course Policies

I. COURSE ADMINISTRATORS

Course Director:  Barbara S Beckman, PhD

• Dr. Beckman's Office: JBJ Rm 108; Email: bbeckman@tulane.edu

II. LECTURE INFORMATION

This is a "team taught" course involving several faculty. Each lecture will be given covering the content of the lecture or exercise. Lectures are commonly recorded on Tegrity & can be reviewed online at a later date.

Text:

No recommended text. Lecture material is presented in class & posted online.

III. COURSE ORGANIZATION

A. Lectures

Lectures are given in Rm 4700 in the Department of Pharmacology. A detailed course outline, including lecture topics and lecturers will be posted before the first class. The endocrine pharmacology curriculum is designed to provide students with a well-rounded view of pharmacological aspects of each area of the endocrine system from both a basic and clinical perspective.

B. Just-in-Time-Teaching (JiTT) sessions

We are implementing a variant of the interactive Just-in-Time-Teaching teaching strategy (Novak et al., 1999; Crouch & Mazur, 2001). We will ask each lecturer to provide a relevant paper on his/her topic to be read in advance of the lecture by the students.  The students will then be required to provide one question they have about the paper/topic to the instructor several days before the lecture. The questions will be forwarded to the speaker to aid in the preparation of the lecture. If the questions are not addressed in the lecture itself, the students are highly encouraged to ask the speaker directly.  

C. Oral assignments

Students will be assigned to small groups and assigned a scientific paper, chosen by Drs. Bratton and Beckman. The groups will present their papers to the class, including a detailed introduction so that everyone in the class can follow the experimental details that follow. The presenters should not only explain the logic and design of the experiments in the manuscript, but should also look for flaws and weaknesses in experimental design and results. We hope that these sessions will be as interactive as possible and encourage questions from the class throughout the presentations.

D. Course grades

The final grade will be based on a combination of class attendance, timely submission of questions for upcoming speakers, and the oral presentation.

Grades will be based on a standard grading scale:

100-95: A

94-90: A-

89-85: B+

84-80: B

79-75: B-

IV. REFERENCES

• Novak GM, Patterson ET, Gavrin AD, Christian W. Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending ActiveLearning with Web Technology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall; 1999.
• Crouch CH, Mazur E. Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. Am J Physics.69 (9): 970-977, 2001.