MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

What dental educational sites are available to the dentist? A good starting point is Omni (http://omni.ac.uk/) which helps the beginner browse through the available sites in dentistry. OMNI (Organising Medical Networked Information) is designed as a portal to assist the teachers, researchers and students in the health and medical sciences.

There are precious few collections available for accessing clinical images but the Bristol BioMed Image Archive (http://www.brisbio.ac.uk) does have a good collection for downloading.

Another simple but effective database of images is the Iowa image database (http://www.uiowa.edu/~oprm/AtlasWIN/AtlasFrame.html). These examples are large collections that are readily available. It is possible to find small collections of material but this is an area that needs redeveloping.

Finding learning materials

Finding learning materials is rather uneven as the learning materials may vary enormously from downloadable stand alone CAL programs to Web based courseware. As the use of the Web has expanded so has the amount of material but most institutions will now for different reasons password protect their material.

This is due to copyright problems linked to either ownership of the material or whether the patient has given permission for it to be used. All schools have some form of intranet but unless one is a teacher at the institution it is often not possible to evaluate them.

However there are schools developing their own web based courseware and some have examples available.

In Birmingham there is a fully interactive web site that encompasses blended learning by offering fully interactive material with conventional lecture notes and other handouts (http://www.dentistry.bham.ac.uk/fordentists/caldownloads.asp). This approach has also been championed by Liverpool who also uses their web to deliver material with their administration of the course (http://www.liv.ac.uk/luds). Both institutions have developed their own Virtual Learning Environments.

Whilst GKT is large institution it also sees the advantage of placing course material such as notes and administration on it own internal server using WebCT (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/teares/gktvc/). Sheffield is a dental school who is also developing a communication environment called iCT.

Whilst all these schools run a virtual campus but it is difficult to go past the first few pages or see a few examples as much of the material is hidden behind

Organisations

It is always good to talk and the following sites are a good springboard to contacting other teachers both within the UK or abroad. The Association for Dental Education in Europe site is particularly useful as their annual conference in Cardiff is taking place in September. The LTSN-01 site is kept up to date with useful nuggets of information. 

http://www.adee.dental.tcd.ie/

http://www.adea.org/ 

http://www.medev.ac.uk/.

Clinical guidelines

There are always trends and areas of interest and the big topic at the moment is evidence based dentistry and there are several useful sites to get you started on this expanding subject.

http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/oralhealth

http://www.ihs.ox.ac.uk/cebd/.

Summary

The strength of the Web is its continuous development and access. Whilst there is material present it is not often freely available and with the copyright of materials becoming more important this is starting to restrict the free use of the Web.

However, there are examples of good practice available which is able to assist the teacher, researcher and student.