Blended Learning - The Efficiency of Video Resources and YouTube in the Modern Dental Education

Abstract

The media-enhanced teaching techniques became popular in the last years because they stimulate the students' engagement and motivation. The educational movies uploaded on YouTube became nowadays a highly used resource for learning in the academic environment. We conducted an opinion survey among the students at the Faculty of Dental Medicine, “Grigore T. Popa” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania, about their agreement and interest in using educational movies as didactic tools, compared with the traditional teaching methods, and about the features they prefer in such materials. The study group included 170 students with average age 20.93 ± 2.751. Most students (91.2%) use didactic movies in their practical training; 77.6% think that the didactic movies from YouTube contain correct scientific information. 74.6% of the students like to learn using didactic movies, 39.7% of them appreciate the oral speech accompanied by PowerPoint Presentations and 46.6% like the oral speech accompanied by written explanations, with no significant differences between genders and age groups. The most popular features of the educational movies are: human narrator (94.7%), who speaks in Romanian (82.4%). The narrator’s speech must be accompanied by animated schemes with explanations (90.6%) and drawings (93.5%). The movie must have a clear structure, evolving from basic to complex (85.9%). The educational movies uploaded on YouTube are an adequate source of information for the dental students; the professionals in universities must survey better the scientific quality of such materials.