Expediting expertise – use of video to afford synthetic clinical experience for student learning

Abstract

Clinical experience in the dental curricula is a costly and precious commodity. Students usually acquire clinical skills in a slow and often haphazard manner usually dictated by the nature of patients’ needs, case complexity, clinical supervisors’ teaching and happenstance. These experiences will be individual for students over the course of their dental programme. It is common for student’s to report feeling unprepared with knowledge gaps and a lack of hard and soft skills when first entering clinics. Video recording of authentic, chairside, in-the-moment clinical teaching episodes between a teacher and student relating to decision making, treatment planning, or assessment of treatment outcomes are a novel way to capture and share clinical dental experience to support other students learning. These clinical experience videos will reduce the repetitive nature of clinical teaching and prepare students better for clinics and demonstrate clinical procedures that students may not have experience of in the simulation laboratory eg. cementation of crowns or bridges or problem scenarios such as poor fitting dentures. A small library of videos recording teacher and students interactions have been captured and uploaded onto a learning management system for students to observe peers interactive teaching moments. This vicarious learning through video affords students synthetic clinical experiences showing them procedures and problems they have not experience before. This will prepare students better cognitively and emotionally during the clinical care of their patients allowing them to focus on different aspects of their patient care sessions. Student will learn procedural and problem solving skills on how to deal with challenging cases through the observation of their peers cases. The nature of the videos will be presented and preliminary findings reported.