Internet discussion forums as part of a student-centred teaching concept of pharmacology

Introduction: The world wide web opens up new opportunities to interconnect electronic and classroom teaching and to promote active student participation. In this project article we describe the use of internet discussion forums as part of a student-centred teaching concept of pharmacology and discuss its advantages and disadvantages based on evaluation data and current literature. Methods and Results: Final year medical students at the Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany) with the elective pharmacology moderated an internet forum that allowed all students to discuss pharmacology-related questions. Evaluation results of forum participants and elective students demonstrated a learning benefit of internet forums in pharmacology teaching. Conclusion: Internet discussion forums offer an easy-to-implement and effective way to actively engage students and increase the learning benefit of electronic and classroom teaching in pharmacology.