Pitfalls in Online Digital Content Creation for Undergraduate Dental Education

Introduction

Dental education with its wide arsenal of pedagogies and instructional methods is considered to be at the forefront in utilizing innovative approaches to deliver learning content at various levels of curriculum. The curriculum is rich in both theoretical and clinical knowledge to equip the student to deal with wide-ranging problems affecting dental health and well-being. The impetus to deliver content online through various approaches has been studied by numerous authors (Kumar et al., 2020). The use of technology and innovative teaching methods was available to students even before the onset of the pandemic (Nicoll et al., 2018). Nevertheless, what the pandemic taught us was the need to have a foolproof method to create, and deliver content along with assessing student performance.

Undergraduate dental education which is at the forefront of utilizing innovative pedagogies and instructional methods to deliver learning content saw an unprecedented disruption globally due to the pandemic (Kerkstra et al., 2022). This disruption in dental education resulted in limited access to traditional forms of learning content and a total disruption of clinical training (Hattar et al., 2021). Not only did this disruption affect the student learning progression but also crippled the overall skill set of the affected learners.

The non-clinical learning content, which relied heavily on face-to-face teaching and tutoring saw a complete shutdown. The hands-on training and apprenticeship were unavailable to the students. The task-based learning, an approach extensively employed to teach procedural tasks halted.

Patient care which is an inseparable training requirement saw the most disruption as the dental training centres were ill-prepared to assist student clinical training needs in a controlled environment (Elangovan et al., 2020). The training centers were not only grappling with learning disruptions but also with fear of transmission amongst the faculty and students.

However, the dental fraternity was quick to adapt and resorted to the use of technology to strengthen the knowledge continuum. Due to the need for physical separation, an asynchronous mode of delivery was used to support and maintain the continuity of lectures and knowledge exchange (Nasseripour et al., 2021). The mainstream method used was through pre-recorded video lectures, PowerPoint lecture slides, and external video hosting platforms such as YouTube videos or through internal or external educational websites, offline tests, and assignments (Azlan et al., 2020). This transition was rather slow and painstaking as the faculty unlike students are not technology savvy (Li et al., 2022). The creation and distribution of online content was in itself a challenge to dental educators. What started as bits of information posted online, spread to bytes of data for the learner to access. This opened the floodgates for content creation from all faculties in real time. The online content generation surpassed the total content generated in traditional formats.

The previously guarded training centers became a powerhouse of content generation and dissemination. This approach although worked for maintaining the knowledge transfer continuum, was limited in maintaining student engagement and retention. This is a very important aspect of digital content in the context of dental education. The extremely limited understanding of student digital learning analytics creates multiple challenges to the current training needs and competencies of the learners. The type, quality, mode, and amount of digital learning content consumed by the learner remain hugely unexplored.

The training centers’ educational portals saw an uprising and served as a go-to platform for the affected learners. However, these portals have minimum features to keep the learner interested, as the level of interaction is limited to likes and shares.