Dental Education During Pandemic – Cross-Sectional Lecturer-Side Evaluation For The Use of Digital Teaching Concepts In German Universities
Abstract Background: The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in significant restrictions on dental teaching. The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the attitudes of faculty members towards digital teaching formats and the effort creating digital lectures. Methods: All German dental faculties were invited from January to April 2021 to the online survey by an anonymous voluntary questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of 27 questions that could be answered with a visual analog scale, free text answers or with fixed answer options. Data was analyzed using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and an exploratory data analysis (α=0.05).Results: Before the pandemic, 24.8% of the participating lecturers were using digital teaching and 64.4% had no previous experience. After the outbreak of the pandemic, more than 80% of the lecturers stated that they offer online lectures (86.1%), online seminars (81.2%), and/or online bedside teaching (33.7%). 88.1% see face-to-face teaching as the preferred teaching format.The lecturers also see the greatest opportunities for interaction in the area of analog teaching and significantly worse in synchronous and asynchronous digital teaching. In the course of the pandemic, respondents' attitudes towards online teaching improved in the median of 24.0 to a median of 50.0. Conclusions: Faculty members have positively changed their attitudes towards online teaching formats over the course of the pandemic. Although they see the greatest learning success in conventional face-to-face teaching formats and the creation of digital lectures is associated with a higher effort, they want more online lessons in the future.