Abstract:
Many dental lecturers are moving away from providing
hand-out notes to their students and are rather opting
for posting lecture material and tutorials on the internet
using the various university platforms such as clickUP.
At the same time a number of students have queried
the need to purchase the prescribed text books due to
their high costs, and dated content. The presumption is
that all students have unrestricted and equal access to
this material, and are competent using digital technology
for learning and assessment, however there has been
no formal investigation into whether this is so.
Student access and usage was reported on in Part I of
this study. The present paper investigated students’
preferences with regards to the mode of learning material,
and their self-perceived competencies in using the
internet for various academic purposes. The project took
the form of an anonymous, structured questionnaire that
was given to all dental students from the second to the
fifth year of study.