Dental program goes digital
Curriculum to be available on DVD; paper to become passè

By LOIS BAKER
News Services Editor

When members of the School of Dental Medicine's Class of 2004 arrive on campus this August, they will purchase no textbooks, no laboratory manuals, no workbooks. They will pick up no course outlines or lists of recommended reading.

They will receive instead one ordinary-looking compact disc.

This digital video disc (DVD) will contain the full content of 90 textbooks in 28 topic areas, ranging from basic anatomy to oral surgery; full text of six to 10 journals, and the curriculum for all four years of dental school, including course syllabi, class notes, laboratory manuals and lecture slides.

The "Age of the Electronic Curriculum" has arrived. By the time the Class of 2004 graduates, the dental school educational program will be completely digital.

"This is a very exciting program that puts educational materials immediately in the hands of students," said Pamela Jones, co-director of the project with Joseph Zambon, associate dean for academic affairs. "It allows them to tailor the way they learn to their individual style, while maintaining the freedom of faculty members to teach in their style."

Zambon said the electronic curriculum, at its simplest, is a much more efficient way for students to get access to the ever-increasing amount of materials they are expected to learn. But beyond that, it has important implications for the art of teaching. "It will enable both faculty and students to break out of the traditional discipline-based modes of instruction and to integrate to a much greater degree the basic, behavioral and clinical sciences."

UB is one of seven dental schools in a consortium that has been meeting quarterly with Vital Source Technologies, Inc. to develop the electronic-curriculum project. The consortium has had a lot of input into what the program will look like and how the software will work, Jones said. Information from this project likely will be used to develop electronic curricula in other medical fields.

The consortium includes Boston University, University of Texas at San Antonio (where the project was piloted), New York University, the University of Medicine and Dentistry at New Jersey, the University of Iowa and the U.S. Navy Postgraduate Dental School.

The price of the DVD has not been set yet, but it is expected to cost about the same as students would spend on required or recommended textbooks, lab manuals and other materials. Students will have to own a personal computer, however. The dental school will decide on a software platform and the DVD will be formatted to work on that platform.

Students also will be able to access the school's clinic-information system through their computers to perform such tasks as ordering instruments, setting up appointments with dental-school patients in the clinics, sending email and searching the Web.

Each DVD will include everything that now is distributed to students on paper, plus lecture slides, video and anything else an individual faculty member wishes to include.

The DVD will be updated twice a year, with each student receiving a disc in January.

The electronic curriculum has multiple advantages for students and faculty over a traditional paper-based curriculum, Zambon said.

"Each student will have all the textbooks and other instructional materials that the course director deems essential, and inclusion of material from journals will make course content more timely. The students will have access to all, not just part, of the course content.

"Instructors will be able to integrate a much larger variety of instructional materials into their courses. All of the text and graphics from the primary textbook in each topic area will be available to use as they wish, either in the classroom or in computer-aided instruction."

Other advantages are more far-reaching, Zambon noted. Licensing the electronic rights to textbooks and journals largely will eliminate concerns over copyright infringement. Dental schools in the consortium will be able to share instructional materials.

Development of the electronic curriculum will enable the UB dental school to expand its continuing education program, and will speed the development of distance-learning programs for UB graduates and other health professionals, he said.