The mobile technology initiative in Butler University's College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences started four years ago with the introduction of laptops for all pharmacy students. A year later laptops were replaced with tablet PCs, which allow students to draw structures, write equations, and more. The faculty relies on technology for teaching, including Blackboard, Adobe Captivate, and a number of Web 2.0 applications such as GoogleDocs and PBWiki. In this interview, Butler's Amy Peak, assistant professor of pharmacy practice and director of drug information services, and Kent VanTyle, professor of pharmacology and director of instructional technology, talk with ComputerTalk's Will Lockwood about the technology supporting pharmacy education and what it means for the profession.

CT: What are the new technologies that you are using now and how are they changing the way pharmacy students learn?

Peak: I use a lot of Adobe Captivate, a program that allows me to create online learning modules. Students can view these videos through Blackboard prior to coming to class, then we can do different activities in class that are more interactive. I don't require textbooks for any class I teach.

It's clear that students who are coming in to college now learn differently than the way most professors learned at their age. Students are the drivers; they are changing the way we teach. It's not really about changing the way students learn, that change has already happened. It's about changing the way we teach in order to achieve better learning outcomes and to become more efficient. We are becoming better teachers when we are doing our best to make time in the classroom reflect knowledge and skills development, which can not be done by students on their own outside of the classroom. Technology allows us to do that. Instead of using the time for one-way delivery of information, technology allows me to put information out there so students can get to it on their own time and so I can then spend class time doing something that is much more interactive and hands-on.

Another thing that has changed is there is now a much greater interaction between faculty members and information resource, or IR, personnel. Now IR is educating educators on how to use technology instead of being just a support network. It's now a partnership.

CT: Kent, what are your thoughts on these topics?

VanTyle: We used to have an animal laboratory as part of our four-semester pharmacology course sequence. We are now using computer based simulations in place of a live animal laboratory that allow students to administer drugs to whole animals or isolated tissue systems and then measure a number of physiological response parameters. This is something you couldn't do without technology. If you make a dosing or experimental error on a computer simulation you learn from it without doing harm. These types of simulations are absolutely invaluable because they allow students to quickly, easily, and economically design and execute pharmacology experiments and to see immediately the results of their experiment. This technology permits just-in-time opportunities for faculty and students to interact around fundamental learning issues.

CT: What effect do you think the technology in the pharmacy curriculum has on how pharmacists entering the workforce will practice?

Peak: The challenge for us is that we want to expose students to some of the best technology while they are here. And some of that is technology in the classroom and some of that is technology in a pharmacy. The challenge we find sometimes is a student will leave here and go into an environment that is much lower tech than they were prepared in because technology is expensive. Where should colleges strike that balance? We would err on the side of preparing students for that high-end technology.

CT: What are some of the areas where you need to pay special attention to make sure that new pharmacists are on the same page with their colleagues when they start practicing.

Peak: Right now the big push is patient safety. You go to the national meetings and everything is about computerized physician order entry and barcoding technology and all of these things to promote patient safety and decrease medication errors. This is where we have to come in and prepare students to understand why it's important.

VanTyle: Practice isn't optimizing the use of technology in areas like information access and collaboration among providers. We know there are chains that don't even let pharmacists have Internet access while they practice by virtue of policy, which is one important area where new pharmacists might find in-pharmacy technology lagging behind what they're used to.

CT: What's on the horizon? What are the next big changes?

Peak: What is on the horizon is driven by the technology and the cost of the technology. Here we focus on health sciences. Patient safety is probably the single biggest initiative that ties to technology. So we will continue with our classroom-based technologies designed to enhance learning and increase student exposure to the technology designed to prevent errors, increase patient safety, and improve medical outcomes. Right now our main focus is using technology to help people learn, to help make us better teachers, and do that all throughout the curriculum. Our challenge as educators is trying to figure out where the technology is going and not get too far behind.

VanTyle: One good example of this is that, at Butler, we are moving towards smart phone technology. This is where mobile technology is moving and this is where drug information access in practice is going. There is no doubt in my mind that the mobile technology program we have in the college is going to transform itself more towards those very small, highly mobile technologies. Small mobile computing devices will only improve and become more readily available. You also have to consider the fact that, with Web 2.0, the Internet has became interactive. You can share information with others so easily. Information flows in a multidirectional and not unidirectional manner. That is why Web 2.0 applications are so exciting. They give us the opportunity to create and share information with students or faculty without having to know complex Web-based languages and to facilitate Web-based collaboration among both students and faculty.