MedChemBlog: An Innovative Distance Learning Experience for Teaching Medicinal Chemistry

A qualified teaching method is hard to achieve without traditional classroom lessons. For learning purposes, students need to interact and influence each other, like being part of an osmotic process. They need to learn in a stimulating environment, developing the ability to manage conflicts and to compare opinions. How can this be possible during a pandemic? In an innovative distance learning experiment, students have been involved in significant changes to traditional teaching methods, forced to reinvent themselves and give up face-to-face interactions. General Medicinal Chemistry and Medicinal and Toxicological Chemistry I courses at Magna Græcia University of Catanzaro (UMG) accepted the pandemic call for challenge by renewing their teaching approach, trying to re-establish the sense of community jeopardized by distance learning. Students have been involved in the creation of a multimedia tool, called “MedChemBlog”, an innovative distance learning experiment. The aim was to improve the understanding of the chemical structures and drug molecular mechanisms of action, in a unique constructive fashion provided by scientific websites and databases, e.g., Protein Data Bank, DrugBank, and PubChem. In this way, students have been involved in the creation of the course’s blog, their “MedChemBlog”, revealed as a collector of “food for thought” for present and future students