Oral Biology Teaching in South African Dental Schools

Introduction: An outcomes based dental curriculum has necessitated revision in course structure, content and teaching methodologies, to allow for integration over the spectrum of disciplines (horizontal) and between pre-clinical and clinical courses (vertical). Oral Biology (OB) is a core biomedical discipline that is crucial to the understanding of normal form and function. At the University of Limpopo Dental Faculty (UL), a revised OB course was developed for 2005, as part of the new curriculum. Objectives: This study aimed to compare the OB courses among the four Universities involved in training undergraduate dental students in SA, and to appraise the time spent on each topic with their perceived importance by practicing dentists. Methods: The study compared the four OB courses in terms of lecturers involved in teaching; year of study and number of students per class; duration of course; contact hours for lectures, tutorials, practical sessions, assignments, and problem based learning; nature of handout material and student notes; and assessment methods used. A questionnaire was sent to 120, randomly selected dentists, requesting them to rate topics currently taught in terms of relevance to dentistry on a five point Likert scale where 1 = extremely relevant, 3= unsure and 5 = not relevant at all. Results: Qualitative and quantitative analyses were used to evaluate the data. The OB course of UL covered more topics and used a wider range of teaching methods than the other three institutions, where lectures predominated. Respondents were either unsure of the relevance of embryology, calcium metabolism and forensics, (26%, 27% and 37% respectively) or rated them irrelevant (13%,7.5% and 9% respectively). The remaining topics were considered relevant by the majority of respondents. Conclusion: Peer review can be used to design new courses having outcomes based structure and content, and eliminating non-relevant topics.