J Dent Educ. 72(6): 725-735 2008
© 2008 American Dental Education Association
Educational Methodologies |
Evaluation of a Blog Used in a Dental Terminology Course for First-Year Dental Students
Maha M.A. El Tantawi, Ph.D.
Key words: e-learning, blog, weblog, dental education, learning
Submitted for publication 09/15/07;
accepted 03/11/08
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Abstract
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This article reports the findings of a study conducted to evaluate a blog used in a dental terminology course. The blog was established using free online software to provide more learning exercises for students and to collect feedback about course proceedings. The instructor posted exercises such as multiple choice and true/false questions and invited students to publish answers. Students were also encouraged to post comments about difficult parts of the course that needed clarification. Students contributed 149 comments, mostly as answers in response to thirteen posts of exercises over three months. All users of the blog who responded to a questionnaire considered it useful, and most of them expressed the opinion that blogs should be used in other courses. The main reason that students reported for not using the blog was lack of time. Statistically significant differences in examination performance existed between students who used the blog and those who did not. Based on these findings, the blog achieved its purposes, which were to enhance instructor communication with students and provide students with practice exercises to improve their understanding of dental terminology. Further research about the application of blogging and its potential to enhance dental education is needed.
There has been movement in recent years towards the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in health professions education, including dental education.1 However, the actual application of ICT to the core learning experiences of students has varied in speed, scope, and objective according to computer literacy, attitude of students and teaching staff, and available resources in terms of money and effort.2,3 In some cases, ICT still needs to make the transition from being a welcome but visiting guest in educational institutions to a permanent and functional resident who plays an important role in implementation of the curriculum. To do this, ICT must demonstrate the capacity to solve existing educational problems and decrease workloads on students and teaching staff, while at the same time not diverting the attention of both parties from the original educational process it aims to enrich. This might help to convince ICT opponents of the value and ultimate utility of the initial substantial investment in budget and other institutional resources needed to establish technology infrastructure and the faculty time needed to redesign courses so that ICT becomes a key component of the students’ educational experience.4
In addition to the usual obstacles facing ICT use in education, developing countries have to solve problems related to deficient ICT infrastructure, lack of ICT culture, and the need to use software and hardware developed in other countries with different needs. It is thus imperative that educational institutions in developing nations choose ICT tools that are consistent with their resources, technology literacy levels, access to information technology, academic culture, and training needs. Employing costly products to replace currently existing and working traditional systems may not be a wise choice in many nations with limited resources available for trial and error experimentation with ICT.
This article describes a new communication tool used to supplement traditional course material in a dental school in Egypt where ICT supports and adds to the course and does not replicate already existing features. The tool has the added advantage of being free to students and easy to use, so that busy dental students do not have to devote their limited time to learning a new software application.
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Materials and Methods
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A dental terminology course was introduced to first-year dental students as a curricular innovation in a recently established dental school in Alexandria, Egypt. All 209 first-year students were required to complete this mandatory course. The course was not previously taught in other Egyptian universities, so existing study materials were limited. Another consideration influencing course design was that the course instructor worked only part-time in the new university, so contact time with students was limited. To increase contact and enhance communication with students and allow them to have access to more practice exercises and study material, the course instructor established a blog.
A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent at the top). A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to the topic. The term "blog" was initiated in 1997 as a "log of the web" or "web-log," which has now been shortened to the abbreviated term.5–7 Standard blog features include personal editorship by easy posting techniques requiring no knowledge of HTML or Javascript, archives of previous posts, and a hyperlinked posting structure with a standalone web page for each post to the blog with a unique URL. This feature facilitates linking to and organizing content within the same blog and also from external sites. Other blog features include frequent updates and free public access to the content via the Internet.6,8,9 Through the use of the technology of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), users can receive complete or summarized new content of their favorable blogs. This can be done through an application similar to an email inbox known as a news aggregator.10 In this study, however, aggregation was not used. Blogs can be hosted and published through software providers, some of which are free like Blogger.com (powered by Google), TypePad, and WordPress.6,11
The dental terminology course blog12 was established using Blogger.com.13 At this site, users can construct blogs using already existing templates and access their accounts through a user name and password. Posts by users are added regularly and scroll off the page as they become outdated. Adding new content does not require any manual editing of the template, but is automated by creating a new post via the Blogger.com user interface. The blog enables visitors to leave comments and participate in discussion through a built-in commenting system, which allows for instantaneous reader feedback on specific items. To add comments, readers need only click a link at the bottom of each post and enter their text. These comments become a permanent part of the post and are displayed along with the original entry when the post is viewed at its unique URL. The number of comments is also displayed on the front page below each post so users can get a sense of where the discussion is taking place.9
The blog features were used by the instructor to post exercises and questions. These exercises included different types of questions, such as multiple-choice questions, complete the missing word/s or phrase, and matching and inserting the correct label on photographs of oral structures. Correct answers and names of students giving them were also displayed, as well as explanations for parts of the course that were not clear. Comments and instructions for the coming quizzes and exams were also published on the blog (Figures 1a
, 1b, and 1c). At the beginning of the course, students were invited to send answers to the email of the instructor to encourage them to access the blog and get useful information without the need to learn new technology represented in the steps to make a comment. After two posts, the students were invited to display answers to exercises through the comment feature in the blog without sending emails, so that all students could benefit from the comments each one made. They were also encouraged to identify parts of the course that were not understood and make comments about exams or lectures. Students were told that the objectives of the blog were to help them by providing practice exercises to enhance their comprehension of dental terminology and to provide a mechanism for communicating feedback about problems encountered in the course to the instructor. Students were also told that participation in the blog was optional and that it did not contribute to their grades in the course.
At the end of the course, a questionnaire was distributed to assess students’ views about the blog and barriers to its use, as well as to determine the profile of users such as gender and comfort with sending answers by email. Use of the blog was evaluated by tabulating the number of posts, comments, and different uses by instructor and students. Student achievements in the course as measured by grades in different exams were compared between those who used the blog and those who did not. The Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Dentistry, Alexandria University approved this study.
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Results
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The first post was made by the instructor on September 28, 2006, and the last post was on December 9, 2006. Figure 2 shows the number of posts and comments made by the instructor and students. In all, there were thirteen posts made by the instructor and 149 comments made by the students. The peak month for both posts and comments was October, which was the first month of posting by the instructor. It is interesting to note that until October 20, the students sent answers to the instructor’s email. After the post on that date, they were invited to put answers as comments directly on the blog; thus, the 103 comments recorded in October were made in ten days. Although only two posts were made by the instructor in December, students made thirty-eight comments directly related to these two posts as well as to the course and exams in general.
Table 1 shows the nature of instructor posts and students’ comments. A single post could contain more than one topic. Thus, it could begin by encouraging the students to participate in the blog and then pose questions or announce rules for an upcoming quiz, so in spite of making thirteen posts, seventeen topics were handled in these posts. Of these posts, 41.2 percent were related to exercises and questions. More than a quarter of the instructor posts were to encourage students to participate in the blog (29.4 percent). About three-fourths of students’ comments were related to exercises and answering posted questions (77.9 percent). A considerable portion of students’ comments were deleted and could not be seen or were repeated (17.4 percent).
Table 2 shows the profile of students who used the blog in comparison with the entire class. The total number of students who used the blog was forty-five (21.5 percent of the class). The number of bloggers among males and females was almost equal (twenty-one and twenty-four, respectively) with no significant difference between the two (P=0.55). About half of the students who emailed answers to the instructor later made comments on the blog. However, some of those who did not email answers later participated in the blog. The difference between the percentages of bloggers who emailed answers and those who did not was statistically significant (P<0.0001).
Table 3 shows the views of students regarding the blog. Out of the sixty-one who responded to the questionnaire, 77 percent reported using the blog. Of those forty-seven who used it, 57.4 percent found it very useful, while the remaining 42.6 percent considered it useful. All users except one reported that the main use of the blog was to practice developing answers to questions. More than half of students (53.2 percent) reported that they used it to ask the instructor about parts of the course that needed explanation. About one-quarter of the students who used the blog reported they used it to get to know other students’ views and how they think (21.3 percent), and one quarter also said they used the blog as one way of using computers and the Internet in education (27.7 percent). Of the forty-seven students who used the blog, 95.7 percent thought that blogs should be used in other courses. Various reasons were given by the fourteen students who reported that they did not use the blog. The major deterrents were lack of time (50 percent) and not being able to understand the technique involved in making comments on the blog (35.7 percent). About one-quarter of the students (28.6 percent) mentioned that they were unable to use the blog because they did not have a computer, and 14.3 percent said they did not use the blog because they cannot use a computer. No student expressed an opinion that the blog was not useful, whether they used it or not.
Figure 3 shows the grades of students who used the blog and those who did not. In all exams, the grades of students who used the blog were significantly higher than the grades of those who did not (for quiz, midterm exam, final exam, and total grade, t=3.49, 4.13, 4.72, and 4.17, P=0.001, <0.0001, <0.0001, and <0.0001, respectively).
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Discussion
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Blogs afford users the advantage of reducing the technical skill required to use various technological features by allowing them to focus on the information and collaborative tasks themselves with few delivery obstacles.14,15 Such technology is known as "transparent technology" because users are able to concentrate more on the learning task by "seeing through" the technological environment they are immersed within.16 Group blogging is particularly popular when the educational institution may not have the facilities or technical infrastructure within their virtual learning environment or learning management systems to provide discussion forums or bulletin boards.11
One way to assess the success of the blog among students is through evaluation of the extent to which students contribute to the blog. In the present study, in which participation was optional (i.e., awarded no grades), total student posts were 149 over about three months. Poonawalla and Wagner9 reported that in one month after adding the counter to their dermatology group blog, there was a total of 149 visits. Gibson17 reported that the thirty-one students in his study contributed 845 posts in the duration of the course in the School of Business at the University of Michigan during the fall of 2004. In this case, however, participation was mandated, and most of the course grade depended on participation in the blog. An interesting feature in my study was that students contributed thirty-eight comments to two posts at the end of the course in December. These were mostly students’ comments on questions in the midterm exam and how they understood them. Other students agreed with the comments of their colleagues and added further explanation for it. Bartlett-Bragg11 has divided the learning process students go through when blogging into five stages starting by the establishment of the blog, introspection, reflective monologues, then reflective dialogues, and, finally, knowledge artifacts. It may be hypothesized that, in my study, some students reached the reflective monologue stage where they moved beyond simple answering of posted questions to consider the learning experience and extract some meaning for further evaluation. Chalk18 indicates that part of the appeal of blogs lies in providing a personal space for the author/editor to express his or her opinions.
Students posted comments either by real names or by nicknames, so each comment could be traced to a separate student. Based on this count, there were forty-five bloggers. However, out of the sixty-one students answering the questionnaire, forty-seven reported they used the blog. This demonstrates that more students might have accessed the blog than those who actually made comments. Williams and Jacobs19 commented on this phenomenon explaining that "lurking" on the blog (by following posts and comments by others without actually making a comment) is perceived by some people as participation. "Lurkers" observe the behaviors of participants in a computer-mediated community, become familiar with the ways of participating, and overcome fears. This behavior might expand the usefulness of the blog well beyond the scope of those who made comments to a larger less well-defined group who reviewed the posted exercises, answered them, and waited for others to post answers, then waited still more for the instructor to announce the correct answers.
The majority of student comments were responses to posted exercises since this was the main objective of the blog. A considerable portion of the posts, however, was either deleted or repeated. This indicates unfamiliarity with the blog technology. It could be speculated, however, that some students changed their minds after publishing a comment and decided to delete it. An advantage of writing a blog response is that it forces students to think how their views and responses might be interpreted by others.19
A significant difference existed between students who were bloggers and those who responded by emailing answers. Different tools for online communication serve different purposes. Emails and discussion boards allow communication between student and teacher as well as between students in a format readily understood by anyone who has previously used emails.14,20 In group email discussion, information is transitory, unfixed, and not archived and, as such, is of limited value in communication that is meant to facilitate knowledge.21 In discussion boards and similarly in blogs, knowledge artifacts are fixed, may be archived in a particular location, and can be interacted with through comments. Using email for communication is rather a one-to-one activity. Generalizing this to a whole class is time- and effort-consuming for the instructor. It also wastes knowledge generated by communication between instructor and student and deprives other students from sharing it. My experience and the findings of this study indicate that some students, however, are clearly email users and will not blog even if invited. Blogging means coming into the open and overcoming shyness by expressing opinions in front of colleagues. It can not be assumed that all students will have this type of personality.
A considerable portion of the students mentioned that they used the blog for reasons related to interaction with their colleagues, such as knowing other students’ views and how they think and getting to know other colleagues more. These students developed this secondary use for the blog—interaction with their colleagues—which was not planned by the instructor. This interaction mainly revolved about the comments made by other students and whether they agreed with or opposed them. Blogs are successful in promoting interactivity, which is more conducive to improved active learning and greater flexibility in teaching and learning.19,23
The blog was useful in one more area: providing feedback about students’ grasp of the material of the course. For example, one lecture included terms of different parts of the gingiva, such as free gingiva, attached gingiva, interdental papilla, and others. A question was posted on the blog requiring students to provide labels of these parts on a colored photograph of the gingiva. Most of the comments were wrong, which alerted the instructor to the need to explain the topic more clearly with the aid of other colored pictures in the next lecture.
Educational uses of blogging are concentrated in the areas of teacher and librarian training.19 Reports of other uses of blogs in education include those hosted by universities such as the Weblog at Harvard Law,19 blogs used in business management classes,17,24 and blogs used in an undergraduate design studio.25 Other blogs are used in graduate classes such as the blog in a graduate seminar called "Rhetoric and Culture of Cyberspace"26 and an MBA blog used by the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology in two course units.19 Studies of blog applications in health professions education include those used in a communication course in the School of Pharmacy,27 in postgraduate medical education,14 and in a dermatology interest group at the University of Texas Medical Branch.9
Most of the studies of blog use in education have reported positive outcomes, as measured by largely qualitative data (e.g., user opinions). Cooper and Boddington24 found that their use of a blog was successful as assessed by the participants’ feeling positive about the experience. Their study, however, demonstrated little difference between blogging and other forms of online communication. MacColl et al.25 mandated posting for a number of different courses, yet left significant room for maneuver within their assessment guidelines and concluded that the introduction of blogs into their courses was successful. Williams and Jacobs19 reported that participation in the MBA blog was optional, but students were advised that five meaningful contributions would earn them five marks. Students’ attitudes were generally positive, indicating that the blog assisted learning in the course, overcame shortage of time available for discussion and interaction in class, and led to their agreeing to participate in some future blogging activity even if it did not count towards the formal assessment of the course. Poonawalla and Wagner9 described the attitudes of a dermatology interest group at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston concerning a blog. Three-quarters of the responders found the blog to be useful. None of the interest group found the comment feature of the blog useful. These authors attributed this finding to the nature of the blog posts, which were primarily announcements or resources. They suggested that increased participation might result if an article summary were posted and bloggers interact in discussion through the comment feature or by having a case of the month or discussion. In my study, all students reported that they considered the blog useful whether they used it or not. Their experience was positive, and they hoped it would be repeated in other courses.
On the other hand, Krause26 reported a largely negative assessment of a blogging experience. This outcome was attributed to a lack of specific requirements for the use of the blog by students (e.g., it was optional) in addition to the nature of the blog, which was individualistic rather than collaborative. Among the negative aspects that have been reported about blogging are difficulties with learning new software formats and identifying and establishing networks, as well as feelings of uncertainty in regard to writing publicly and motivation to post regularly.22 Other technical barriers were cited, including lack of familiarity with blogs and lack of understanding of the potential of content aggregation and RSS feeds.14
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Conclusion
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In this study, students who were bloggers had higher grades on exams in the course than nonbloggers. This finding, however, needs to be interpreted with caution. It should not be taken to mean that blogging helped the students to higher achievements in the course. This conclusion of causality can only be based on results of an experiment in which students are randomly assigned to a test group of blogging and a control group of no blogging. Implementing a randomized study design is problematic in natural settings, such as a dental school, due to difficulties in achieving comparable situations, avoiding contact between groups in which they may share material specifically intended for one group, and possible ethical problems such as depriving some people of a potentially richer learning environment.28 It could be concluded, however, that bloggers are keener students who are more committed to their studies and may be more likely to make use of additional resources than other students. Whether through traditional study material available in the course or through the blog, their work resulted in better grades than their colleagues.
Further studies are needed to examine the suitability of different online communication tools to intended learning outcomes of different courses as well as to different students’ personalities and learning methods. Acceptance by students and teaching staff and ways to enhance it are other research priorities. The cost-effectiveness of these methods compared to traditional teaching methodologies needs also to be evaluated. All these issues need to be addressed in the context of existing ICT culture; institutional, financial, and human resources; curriculum design; and students’ backgrounds and experiences.
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Author Information
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Dr. El Tantawi is Lecturer, Department of Pediatric and Community Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry, Alexandria University. Direct correspondence and requests for reprints to her at Faculty of Dentistry, Champolion Street, 21521, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt; 00203-4868066, ext. 221 phone; 00203-4868286 fax; maha_tantawy{at}hotmail.com.
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[Abstract]
[Full Text]
[PDF]
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Abstract
Materials and Methods
