I have been asked to do a couple of presentations in the near future about the future of dental education and specifically dental implant education.
The significance of one of these will become clear with the stories that I tell going down the line, but (mysteriously) I can't tell that story yet.
I thought the first and best place to riff about this was here, just to get my head clear and straight (as producing a blog often does) on where we're going.
For the past 3.5 years, I have had the enormous privilege of being ‘in charge’ of the ITI Academy, which is the online presence the ITI has for education in 100 countries.
I'm currently in charge of and working with a group of about 30 or so extraordinarily talented clinicians and administrators to help get this project into a better place and to push it in the direction we believe that modern education is going.
I have a view here; it may not be perfect, and it's probably not right, but I definitely do have a view.
And so it's clear to me that there is an extraordinary race to the bottom that is occurring in all aspects of education and, in particular, the dental education.
Online education done cheaply seems to be the winner for everybody.
But of course, the race to the bottom always ends up at the bottom.
The second race is the race for ‘snackable’, short content that people can consume in less than 90 seconds.
How the royal f**k do you learn something as complicated as a career in implant dentistry in 90-second snippets?
The third thing is that online education and stackable education depersonalise and dehumanise education.
A brilliant head teacher once explained to me that children do not learn in a linear way; they learn in bursts. It's like a cloudburst in different places,
Boom, boom, boom,
all over the sky, and then it coalesces like clouds of knowledge.
What a beautiful metaphor.
We assume that learning is like climbing a flight of stairs, when in fact learning is like randomly flying a plane with a smoke chamber at the back around the sky and trying to fill in the holes.
And so how do we deal with this in dental education moving forward?
100%, we must use extraordinarily high-quality online content (and it must be this), which is interactive and engaging to help facilitate the face-to-face contact that is brutally essential to make clinicians ethical, honest, and skilled, and the complicated world of implant dentistry, dentistry and medicine.
That's the future; you can break that down into its component parts now, but if you're not doing this and you're chasing cheaper and faster, it won't last very long (I don't think).
Blog Post Number - 4675
Chicco is coming to Nottingham
This October, we’ll be welcoming Dr Chicco from Tanzania to The Campbell Clinic for his first visit to the UK.
To celebrate, we’ve launched Buy a Mile, asking our community to buy as many miles of his 4,745-mile journey as they can. Every £1 donated represents one mile, with every penny raised going directly to Bridge2Aid and its dental education work in Tanzania.
Buy a Mile and support Bridge2Aid here