Innovative Integration of Facebook Groups in Biomaterials Course: Perception of Dental Students

BACKGROUND: Calls for incorporating Facebook into the academic process to achieve educational purposes were done since more than 10 years. OBJECTIVES: This study was designed to assess the perception of the dental students towards the use of Facebook in learning of the Biomaterials course and to determine if there is a gender-based difference in the students’ perception. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: This cross sectional study was conducted on the 3(rd) year undergraduate dental students, at one of Saudi universities during the academic year 2016-2017 using a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to all students with a response rate 100%. Data was analyzed using the SPSS version 16. RESULTS: The female students were significantly more satisfied with the course than the male as they wanted to use Facebook to study the other topics of the Biomaterials course (p=0.01) as well as to study the other subjects (p=0.012) and they thought that Facebook can be used for scientific discussion (p=0.01).The willing to use Facebook in future learning was high among the female students but with no significant difference between both males and females. It was unexpected to find low agreement score among the participants on their preference to have assignments, movies, feedback or even reminders on Facebook with no significant difference between males and females. CONCLUSION: Integrating learning through Facebook groups into the dental courses was generally well-perceived among the dental students and specifically accepted for the Biomaterials course. Students were willing to apply such model in other dentistry subjects. Further investigation of the impact of the approach on students’ performance is recommended.