Becoming a dentist from home: Online dental education during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

School shutdowns in the United States due to Covid-19 forced many dental schools who rely on in-person learning to search for alternatives that maintain the quality of their institution's education. Two online alternatives include the remote learning model, which aims to replicate the live classroom experience, and prerecorded learning that provides the course material in a lump sum for students to review at their own pace. Administering didactic learning in an online format contains challenges such as technological limitations and disparities between student-home environments. Overcoming these obstacles and successfully replicating the live classroom experience relies on the preservation of student-teacher engagement to assess student comprehension. Moving forward, dental schools should consider opting to maintain aspects of online alternatives to allow students to allocate more or less time to tasks based on individual needs versus continuing the standardized lecture blocks used with in-person classroom learning.