Dental students’ self-perceived competency and usage of the internet for learning and evaluation purposes - Part 2

Abstract

Many dental lecturers are moving away from providing hand-out notes to their students and are rather opting for posting lecture material and tutorials on the internet using the various university platforms such as clickUP. At the same time a number of students have queried the need to purchase the prescribed text books due to their high costs, and dated content. The presumption is that all students have unrestricted and equal access to this material, and are competent using digital technology for learning and assessment, however there has been no formal investigation into whether this is so. Student access and usage was reported on in Part I of this study. The present paper investigated students’ preferences with regards to the mode of learning material, and their self-perceived competencies in using the internet for various academic purposes. The project took the form of an anonymous, structured questionnaire that was given to all dental students from the second to the fifth year of study.