Virtual and Traditional Lecturing Technique Impact on Dental Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors for conducting the present study which addresses the virtual learning on dental education.

Here go a few of my concerns.

TITLE AND ABSTRACT

Looks good and acceptable

KEYWORDS

Please remove the superscript numbers and space the last keyword

INTRODUCTION

The detailed description of the academic programme of the Romania schools is unneeded. May the authors summarize to a short sentence?

The authors should avoid the speech of we did this or we use that. As it happenes in the WebEx paragraph. Try to generalize the concepts in the Introduction. Make the concepts global in order to be applicable to every school. You will have the oportinity to debate your particular school in the results and Discussion. Focusing everything in your schools description make the study limited, but if you make it more global it is applicable more widely.

METHODS

Part of the first paragraph describes the context on the pandemic changes that were introduced. But those are not Methods. Althoght they may be presented in the Discussion

Who made the questions for the survey? One individual or an organized groups?

How many invitations were addressed to the participants?

How were the possible duplication of survey answers managed?

How were the participants selected and recruited?

Which platform was used to deliver the survey?

Between which dates the survey was conducted?

How long, after the final survey date, the platform was open for late responses?

RESULTS

The reformulation of the Table 1 in a chart would make the results more easy to read.

DISCUSSION

 I advise to debate the paper by Meirinhos et al. (https://doi.org/10.14744/eej.2019.43534). They express very well the perceptions of the online learning students on an online congress. You may also debate the differences on a continuous programme, such as an academic full calendar and a short learning event such as a congress which became a routine nowadays.

Do the authors see a possible problem in the nowadays learning in the professional capacity of the future young professionals? Do the authors fill the COVID situation may somehow jeopardize or benefit the students currently enrolled in the clinical years?

May the authors debate the study strength and limitations?

REFERENCES

Please review the references, some are not according to the journal instructions

Author Response

Point 1: Please remove the superscript numbers and space the last keyword

Response 1: The superscript numbers were removed and the last keyword was spaced.

Keywords: Coronavirus; Dental education; Virtual lecturing; Traditional lecturing

INTRODUCTION

Point 2: The detailed description of the academic program of the Romania schools is unneeded. May the authors summarize to a short sentence?

Response 2: The detailed description of the academic program of the Romania schools was introduced at the request of a reviewer: „You should explain the dental education system in your school to make it easier for the audience to understand because the dental education system is totally different between countries and regions.”

Point 3: The authors should avoid the speech of we did this or we use that. As it happenes in the WebEx paragraph. Try to generalize the concepts in the Introduction. Make the concepts global in order to be applicable to every school. You will have the opportinity to debate your particular school in the results and Discussion. Focusing everything in your schools description make the study limited, but if you make it more global it is applicable more widely.

Response 3:

We tried to present the concept of online learning in the Introduction, between lines 65 to 67:Educational electronic platforms like WebEx ® and Moodle® are presented by educational institutions as an official alternative for non classroom activities and can be used for the didactic activity and the students evaluation.

The paragraph about Faculty of Dental Medicine was moved in Discussion, between lines 174-176:

At the Faculty of Dental Medicine, it was decided that WebEx ® and Moodle®platforms will be used for the didactic activity and the students evaluation.

METHODS

Point 4: Who made the questions for the survey? One individual or an organized groups?

Response 4: All authors contributed to the selection of questions for the survey.

Point 5: Who made the questions for the survey? One individual or an organized groups?

Response 5: All authors contributed to the selection of questions for the survey.

Point 6: How many invitations were addressed to the participants?

Response 6: One invitation

Point 7: How were the possible duplication of survey answers managed?

Response 7: It was not the case

Point 8: How were the participants selected and recruited?

Response 8: - The present study was carried out considering the disciplines of pedodontics and orthodontics and oral rehabilitation and all students from these disciplines were enrolled in the study. Participation in this survey was optional.

Point 9: Which platform was used to deliver the survey?

Response 9: Moodle®, because all the participants know and have acces to this platform

Point 10: Between which dates the survey was conducted?

Response10: Students answered the questionnaire only once, in 2020, when they completed their training in the above-mentioned disciplines (pedodontics and orthodontics and oral rehabilitation).

Point 11: How long, after the final survey date, the platform was open for late responses?

Response11: The platform was open for responses for one week

DISCUSSION

Point 12: I advise to debate the paper by Meirinhos et al. (https://doi.org/10.14744/eej.2019.43534). They express very well the perceptions of the online learning students on an online congress. You may also debate the differences on a continuous program, such as an academic full calendar and a short learning event such as a congress which became a routine nowadays.

Response 12: The content between lines 206 to 208 of the discussion section was added.

                The results of the online survey conducted by Meirinhos et al. expresses the perception of the participants in an online conference by emphasizing that most of them consider online lectures a great way to supplement their knowledge [23].

New reference:

23. João Meirinhos, Mariana Pires, Rui Pereira da Costa, Jorge Martins. Receptivity and Feedback to the Online Endodontics Congress Concept as a Learning Option - An International Survey. Eur Endod J. 2020, 5(3), 212-218.

Point 13: Do the authors see a possible problem in the nowadays learning in the professional capacity of the future young professionals?

Response 13: No, because the professional capacity of young professionals can be further enhanced by their professional development by attending courses and conferences.

Point 14: Do the authors fill the COVID situation may some how jeopardize or benefit the students currently enrolled in the clinical years?

Response 14: The COVID situation can be a challenge for students currently enrolled in clinical years, as they will have to learn to adapt to the dynamics with which things can change. This is a novelty, because we were used to every thing being predictable and following a well-established plan.

Point 15:  May the authors debate the study strength and limitations?

Response 15: The study has several limitations. First limitation of this study was that learning methods were assessed in students in their senior years of study. As the knowledge varies between academic years, using senior students could lead to bias in the study because of their knowledge and skills in pedodontics, orthodontics and oral rehabilitation depend on the knowledge acquired from other disciplines. Second, generalization is also difficult because the study was conducted for three disciplines, in a single educational unit. Third, this study evaluated the impact from the theoretical point of view and did not consider the analysis of acquired clinical skills. Other limitation of this study is that only students from a single dental school participated in this study.

Strength of this study. As this situation could last, or could reappear at anytime, we should find alternatives to further the training of our students as an alternative to face-to-face classical education. Knowing the students' point of view, this study helps us teachers to improve the quality of online teaching.

REFERENCES

Point 16:  Please review the references, some are not according to the journal instructions

Response 16: The bibliography has been revised according to the journal instructions

Thank you very much for both review reports and for the extremely useful observations and suggestions!

Kind regards,

Dr. Cristina Bartok-Nicolae

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper on the topic of student teaching in times of the covid 19 pandemic. It contrasts traditional education with face-to-face lectures and seminars with online teaching, analyzing preferences, interactivity, and opportunities for feedback. Overall, the students saw an advantage in electronic teaching, and there was mostly no difference in the results achieved by the students.

In most cases, the flexibility of online teaching was seen as an advantage, as was the length of the presentations.
The disadvantages of the study, such as the exclusive participation of students from higher semesters or the implementation at only one location, were clearly addressed.

The authors should pay a little more attention to the design of the questionnaires. With regard to their design, they are somewhat brief. the possibility of providing free-text answers or comments was not mentioned here. It seems that all the questions included in the questionnaire are shown in table 1. Is that correct? Please include in the discussion.
This article, even if it cannot be generalized in terms of the statement, shows at least as a mosaic stone that the pandemic-related conversion of teaching to online teaching is accepted and does not bring any significant disadvantages with regard to the results. And thus this article also provides important information about the acceptance of online teaching for the future.

Author Response

Point 1:The authors should pay a little more attention to the design of the questionnaires. With regard to their design, they are somewhat brief. the possibility of providing free-text answers or comments was not mentioned here. It seems that all the questions included in the questionnaire are shown in table 1. Is that correct? Please include in the discussion

Response 1:

The content between lines 120 to 121 of the Materials and Methods section was added.

All the questions included in the questionnaire are shown in table 1.

The content between lines 227 to 230 of the discussion section was added.

As in any other study of this kind, another limitation of the study format is that the questionnaire consisted closed questions only and did not give participants the opportunity to provide free text answers or comments, which restricted participants from expressing their views.

Thank you very much for both review reports and for the extremely useful observations and suggestions!

Kind regards,

Dr. Cristina Bartok-Nicolae

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author, I have no more concerns

Author Response

Thank you,
Respectfully
Dr.Cristina Bartok

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Please add the limitation of this study to the discussion part.
2. If possible, please add how much the score changed between traditional lecture and virtual lecture in the same student.

Reviewer 2 Report

In Virtual and traditional lecturing technique impact on dental education, the authors compare virtual versus traditional lectures and the impact on student opinion of the experience and their grades under each condition. Overall, the paper provides some data on how students prefer virtual lectures for some aspects like flexibility. But we already know these attitudes from more than 20 years of online education research. Evaluating differences pre-COVID-19 (in person) to during the pandemic (online) also has flaws in just that during the pandemic involved emergency remote teaching and much more stress for students. In addition, there is very little controls for evaluating student grades. Is it the same assessment as prior years and same difficulty? Are the students equal in prior knowledge or skills (no pre-test done). The authors seem very new to the field of online education. So the results are not really new information to the field as research should be. The information is possibly new at their school, but not really a contribution to the field that should be published. I'd rather not put more papers out there as perceived novel just because people were new to online learning during the pandemic, especially when this field is way more advanced than this paper like VR patients or labs for students to get hands-on experiences even when remote. I think the study is important to share with colleagues internally for people to overcome any hesitations they have to online teaching, but there is already much more thorough studies published that go way beyond this. I appreciate the effort the authors went through to collect the data to encourage evolution of their program to include digital.. 

If you specify to the field of denistry, for example, this is a 13-year old paper discussing the value of videos and virtual learning for the field and even experimenting with VR at that time. https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2008.299

Or this similar study of dental student attitudes of online learning from 2017: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1013905217300561

Reviewer 3 Report

Overall impression

In this paper the authors aim at presenting the research results of identifying the COVID-19 pandemic influence on dental education, by assessing the dental student’s perception and their didactic performance regarding virtual and traditional lectures.

• The article has been rewritten modifying some of the proposals made, such as the fact that the sample was very small, in order to increase it, the survey was carried out with students from three different disciplines, from 3 different academic years. What does not increase the degree of significance since the population is increasingly dispersed and heterogeneous.
• In the introductory section, new data on Dental Studies that are not relevant to the study are provided. Not much more.
• The data offered are about the students' perception of quite obvious aspects, so I still do not see the interest of its publication for the scientific community
• In such practical disciplines of an experimental degree (Dental Medicine), evaluating the perception of the theoretical sessions alone is quite poor. How has practical teaching been resolved during the pandemic? is the one that truly faces the greatest challenges

I still think it shouldn't be published.

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors in my opinion, the study needs some changes that I expose next.

INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK.-

- The introduction and theoretical background needs to be adjusted so as to provide a deeper background on the subject matter. For example, the content between lines 197 to 205 of the discussion section can be moved to this section. Add more recent/relevant and diverse references.

RESULTS.-

- The illustration of graphs would help to follow the reading of the results obtained in this study. The authors do not include any graphs that more clearly illustrate the results.

DISCUSSION.-

- This section should be rewritten. This section has been set up around unrelated ideas. The authors have not discussed the results obtained in their study. In this section, the authors should explain the consistency (or not) of their results with the results obtained in similar studies. Thus, it is interesting to show how the most relevant results of the study are articulated with other related works in the field. This has not been done.

- An important limitation of the study is also the size of the sample (106 students).