Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Distance Learning in Dental Education During COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey

Objective: COVID-19 pandemic affect dental education as well as everything. Online education become more popular in dentistry nowadays. It was aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of online lessons and satisfaction of the students about distance learning. Methods: It was asked to respond a 42-items questionnaire at University of Usak, School of Dentistry. Seven questions were aimed to gather information related to demographic data. Thirty-two lickert and three multiple choice questions to determine the quality of current non-clinical and clinical education and to form a guide for future online dental education. The questionnaire was filled out anonymously. The answers were analyzed on IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 22.0 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA). Results: This study aimed to reach 316 dental students, of which 302 (95.5%) responded. The percent of female students was 57.6% and male students was 42.4%. Male students more pleased than female students in term of distance learning (p=0.032). Fourth grade students were significantly pleased distance learning than first and second grades students according to the satisfaction questions (p<0.05). Most of the students agreed that they would prefer blended education (strongly agree, 43%; agree, 22.2%). Conclusion: A certain satisfaction about online education was not obtained. Online clinical-based lessons were more difficult to understand for the students. Most of the students agreed that blended education is a good choice. It can be concluded that blended education will be a good alternative system for future dental education.