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Apps were originally designed for general productivity and information access. Then, rapidly increasing public demand led to an explosive growth to include other valuable categories, such as the use of mobile digital media and applications in education [3]. Besides the presentation and illustration of the new mobile-based application “DCO”, our study is, to authors´ best knowledge, the first to assess the use of this organizational tool and dual assessment application in dental education.
The survey showed mid-level acceptance among the interviewed students despite two reminders. The response rate was 58.8%, which can be classified as average but still provides a reliable answer and conclusion to the research issue [13].
The answers to Q1, Q5, and Q7 support the first hypothesis that digital applications such as apps can be integrated into dental education and facilitate organization. Student agreement and overall satisfaction with the availability of the digital organization and dual assessment application obtained a median value of 64.0% (Q1). In general, this indicates that the students are supportive of the application’s implementation in the daily treatment routine. This mirrors the fact that the number of apps offered for training and teaching in medicine is steadily increasing [14]. Students can now book appointments from home, are much more flexible in their scheduling, and have an overview of their appointments, treatment progress, and important notes stored in the app.
The explanatory videos in the screencast format were found to be good and sufficient for operating the app features (Q2). Requests to the help information email address in case of technical difficulties, problems, or general questions were almost non-existent, which is also reflected in Q8. There were only occasional incorrect appointment bookings or incorrectly created treatment step sheets, which could be corrected by the supervising teaching doctor or student.
The results of evaluations of the dual assessment feature, self-assessment, and teaching doctor assessment were significantly different (p = 0.002). The teaching doctors perceived a greater advantage of the teaching doctor assessment than did the students of the self-assessment, confirming the third hypothesis and rejecting the second hypothesis in our investigation. This is possibly due to the fact that it is difficult for the students to assess themselves correctly for dental steps they have never or rarely performed on patients [15]. High-performance students tend to evaluate themselves critically and more accurately and tend to underrate their performance, whereas low performers tend to overrate themselves [15,16,17,18]. In this context, the ability to self-assess one’s qualifications as an oral health care provider is an important competency [19,20,21]. Therefore, it will be of interest to examine the differences between self- and teaching doctor assessments in further studies.
The advantage of the app for planning and organizing the patient’s appointment calendar was rated as neutral. It is possible that students are no longer familiar with the old booking system, and many students may use their own private calendars. These observed results would likely have been more favorable if the students knew the conventional system of appointment organization.
The prefabricated flowcharts (Fig. 3) for the individual prosthetic treatments with treatment steps available in the app were found to be very helpful for preparation. A clear, predetermined structure and template, with individual customization, gives students confidence and can help them in the theoretical preparation of their practical work.
Finally, the app “DCO” was given an average score of 2.4 (1 = very good to 6 = insufficient), whereby 56.9% of the respondents rated the app with a 2 (2 = good).
This investigation presents an app for mobile devices and desktop computers to optimize clinical teaching workflows and assessment. The results outline how the use of app technologies can provide an infrastructure for managing organization and daily evaluation in dental education.
Furthermore, by switching from paper format to digital media, a sustainable benefit can be achieved in the long term. By adapting the app to other curricula, this app could also be used to organize education at other universities. Some limitations of the present investigation should be mentioned. IT support is required to update the app, back up data, and troubleshoot problems, which, in addition to the high costs of programming, leads to continuous follow-up costs. The technology and the handling of digital devices was not questioned and was assumed to be known without verification. Moreover, students without access to a private digital device might be disadvantaged. This factor could compromise the survey answer and satisfaction rates and could lead to many other inequities in the perceived experience with the app. As already mentioned, the students in this investigation were not familiar with the conventional system of appointment booking and organization, which might have biased the assessments. Generally, the evaluation is missing a control group that has never worked with the digital organization and assessment tool. By contrast, they seem to consider it as an established digital tool. A weakness of the assessment feature is that no time limit was set to finish the self- and teaching doctor assessments, which might have negatively affected the results.
After the app has been presented and assessed and the advantages and disadvantages described, it would be of great interest for educational research in general to take a closer look at the dual assessment and its results. Therefore, it would be inspiring to investigate the accuracy and discrepancy of self- and teaching doctor assessments according to academic performance in daily dental clinical courses over time. The app is currently only available for our faculty but could be made available and adapted for other universities and subject fields to enable multicenter studies. One idea for further research could be to run one course without the digital organization with the same students/participants or to divide a semester into users and non-users and compare the results. It would also be interesting to analyze the use of the app for a longer period.