Effect of COVID-19 on Dental Education: A Review

Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) has become a pandemic and a real threat for those working in healthcare. It has affected dental professionals in education, research, and practice. This article intended to review the impact and brunt of COVID-19 outbreaks on dental education and research country wise and how it affected the three learning domains - cognitive domain, psychomotor domain and affective domain. A review was designed to identify the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on dental education. A literature search was conducted using PubMed, Scopus and Google scholar databases. Studies in which teaching methods by virtual means were described and how it affected dental education during the pandemic all over the world were included. The search terms selected to search for literature were dental education, COVID-19, dental schools and dentistry. COVID-19 has caused a significant change in overall dental education in all the countries. It has affected dental education both negatively and positively. The pandemic caused disruption in learning leading to psychological distress. Even though many students preferred web-based learning, majority of them considered learning through online mode as a challenge. COVID-19 pandemic has enforced all the dental schools to modify their traditional way of teaching to an alternate mode of teaching to adapt to this current situation of the pandemic all over the world. It caused an everlasting impact on dental education, research along with practice. The dental institutes must be well prepared to face this pandemic by investing in educational software so that it leads to the evolution and advancement in the fields of virtual mode of teaching, in research and in preclinical training.