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Letters to the Editor

From Volume 47, Issue 2, February 2020 | Page 171

Authors

David Dewhurst

College of Medicine and Veterinary, Medicine University of Edinburgh

Articles by David Dewhurst

David Felix

Postgraduate Dental Dean, Director of Dentistry, NHS Education for Scotland

Articles by David Felix

Article

The Scottish Dental Education Online (SDEO) Project

Readers may be interested to learn about a collaborative project between NHS Education for Scotland, the university dental schools and the dental therapy schools in Scotland – Scottish Dental Education Online (SDEO).

SDEO was established in 2008 to support the collaborative development of high-quality digital learning resources, covering curricular topics which are either difficult to teach or which can benefit from the use of technological features such as 2D and 3D animations, video and interactive self-assessments. Development is by small teams of experts in each partner university working closely with a professional learning technologist. Resources go through a two-stage quality assurance process to ensure that they are of high quality, accurate, up-to-date, developed to agreed technical standards and specifications and meet ethical and legal requirements. Resources fall into three categories:

  • Complete stand-alone learning packages designed to be used by students/practitioners independent of tutor support. Typically, these are highly interactive and designed to occupy students for between 20 minutes and an hour of study time. Some are virtual cases, some are interactive tutorials with built-in self-assessments, many have video content and 3-D animations and some have voice over. Currently, there are just over 60 learning packages covering quite diverse topics and these have been categorized in the SDEO website (www.sdeo.ac.uk) as: oral biology; anatomy and physiology; dental materials; microbiology; immunology and pathology; oral surgery; oral medicine; radiology and radiography; operative dentistry; fixed and removable prosthodontics; endodontics; periodontics; special care dentistry; patient safety; clinical governance; dental public health; orthodontics; and paediatric dentistry.
  • There are also a large number of learning objects available for teachers to download and incorporate into their own teaching. These include (numbers in brackets): 2-D and 3-D images (1741); 3-D animations (88); and video clips (193).
  • Virtual Microscopy (VM) slides. SDEO has also developed its own VM system that allows users to view and manipulate 3-D images of dental histological and histopathological slides. Currently there is a collection of 148 slides.

    • Access to all of these resources is free and via both the SDEO website, and the NHS Education for Scotland’s platform for learning and support resources. In 2019, the site received over 6,800 visits (up by about 1000 from 2018), with the majority accessing the learning packages (46.7%), VM (16.1%), learning objects (3.3%), and administrative resources such as meeting notes, website statistics, etc (5.1%). The ‘bounce rate’ was 33%. The majority of visits are from the UK (91%), USA (2%), Malaysia (2%), India, China, Germany, France, Netherlands (each 1%) and all other countries <1%. Eighty-four percent of users accessed resources from a desktop computer and 16% from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

    Evaluations have been very positive. For example, data collected from >2000 users of the learning packages shows that 86.2% gave the learning packages either a 5* or 4* rating and the following percentage of users either strongly agreed or agreed with the statements in brackets: 85.3% (interesting and stimulating); 82.1% (improved understanding); 88.4% (clear presentation); 73.1% (challenging and motivating); 86.2% (right length); 80.4% (good interactive features).

    In conclusion, it is clear that SDEO has proved to be an extremely valuable project in supporting dental education and training for the wider dental community, particularly across Scotland but also internationally, and we hope that this will be of interest and value to the readers of Dental Update.