The Division of Pharmacy Profession Development serves both pharmacists nationwide and pharmaceutical industry scientists worldwide. With industrial downsizing and company reduction in travel allowances, scientists have increasingly requested more accessible programs requiring less travel. To meet these learner needs the division decided to modify and repurpose one of its earlier drug development courses as a blended distance education program.

“An Introduction to the Drug Development Process: Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls” is based on a previous live on-campus short course that was a very successful industrial program designed to survey the entire drug development process up to the first-in-man clinical trials.

Rather than offering a completely asynchronous web-based program, it was decided to present the course with definite starting and closing dates by using webinars to introduce and end the program. The presentations for this course consisted of an initial webinar with two introductory lectures, followed with 12 asynchronous lectures that the scientist could complete over an eight week period. In order to advance to the next lecture, the learner was required to complete a self-check test to help reinforce the important points in each lecture. In the following month there was an intermediate webinar to review an exercise from the last asynchronous lecture and discuss a drug product case study. Then over a four week period the enrollees will be required to complete six additional asynchronous lectures using the same format as the previous lectures. The pilot course will conclude with a webinar in late April with a review of any new regulatory issues (e.g., FDA guidances or EMA requirements), two case studies and the opportunity to ask questions of any of the program speakers.

It is envisioned that this course will be offered twice a year. Once the initial presentation of this course is complete an in depth evaluation of the program will be performed. To date, all initial comments received form the course participants have been extremely positive. Based on the results, other Madison on-campus short courses may be converted to distance education programs using this same or a similar format.