Web-based 3D Online Crown Preparation Course for Dental Students

Despite enthusiasm for the educational potential of the World Wide Web, few dental educators use the new opportunities offered by this medium beyond the presentation of textual information. Based on this observation, we have decided to design our own interactive Web-based 3D crown preparation course. The course objective is to provide dental students with fundamental didactic and technical knowledge to begin preclinical skill development for full crown preparations. The course incorporates a variety of interactive features including images which allow students to examine the dimensions and contours of the burs in comparison to the dimensions and the shape of the crown preparation. QuickDraw 3D allows the direct manipulation of 3D graphical models by the users. This paper will relate experiences in the development and implementation of a Web-based course with 3D direct manipulation. An initial evaluation of the development process offers directions for further development, necessary technical support, and faculty and student preparation. INTRODUCTION A rapidly increasing number of continuing medical and dental education courses is available on the Internet. Currently, Temple University School of Dentistry (TUSoD) integrates several of such Web-based resources into the school’s intranet to enhance the opportunities for teaching and patient treatment, e.g. the Pulp Therapy Chapter of the Atlas of Pediatric Dentistry and Lexi-Comp's Clinical Reference LibraryTM . While there are more online courses offered for medicine than for dentistry, we were able to locate 157 online dental courses offered by 32 providers in an earlier study by Schleyer. The result of this study indicated that the quality and length of the currently offered courses vary significantly. For instance, most courses scored very low on a preliminary quality index for educational software. Despite enthusiasm for the educational potential of the World Wide Web, empirical evidence from this study suggests that only a few dental educators use the new opportunities offered by this medium beyond the presentation of textual information with incorporated images. Furthermore, we examined available anatomy Web sites for content to support the process of learning crown preparations. While there are excellent anatomy courses available via the Web, none of them offered enough detailed information related to human teeth. These investigations about existing dental and anatomy online resources indicated that we had to design our own interactive 3D crown preparation course. METHOD In order to design an online tool to teach dental students how to prepare anterior teeth for porcelain fused to metal crowns, we informally surveyed prosthodontics instructors in our school. Their major requirements for a crown preparation course were detailed, three-dimensional models of the tooth in various stages of completion, the ability to compare models of procedural steps with the actual technique of producing that step (on-demand video for each step), the ability to compare and evaluate dental bur dimensions to tooth dimensions and contours, and to actually measure and focus in on bur dimensions so that the student will appreciate the bur dimensions and shapes relative to the procedural tasks, and the ability to easily move from step to step, in any order desired. The main objective of a crown preparation course is to provide foundation knowledge for the student to begin preclinical skill development for full crown preparations. This foundation knowledge and successive skill development are necessary to begin the clinical phase of learning, the objective of which is to become competent in full crown preparation clinically. Temple University School of Dentistry’s (TUSoD) strategic computing plan requires that every new application has to be tightly integrated into our existing intranet. Thus, only a Web-based application could be used for such a teaching tool. Resource allocation Budget constraints and a difficult situation on the labor market for information technology (IT) did not allow us to develop an entirely proprietary technology to reach our goals. In addition, it was planned that the new course shall function as a catalyst for further developments of highly interactive 3D direct manipulation courses covering various aspects of clinical dentistry. Thus, we focused our investigation on existing technological solutions, off-the-shelf 3D tooth models, and easy-touse editing tools. The development team was led by one faculty member of the school’s Department of Dental Informatics. All content aspects were guided by two faculty members of the school’s Department of Restorative Dentistry. Development and production was handled by an intern student from the German University of Applied Sciences, Dresden, who worked at TUSoD for 6 months.