During the 2016 AADR/CADR Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, California, a panel discussion about Big Data in Dental Research and Dental Education took place thanks to the leadership of Dr. David Clark from the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Branch at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health, on March 18, 2016. I was invited to present my vision of a Dental Education Data Warehouse. Inspired by Marc Triola from NYU, I postulated for dental education that the ‘Dental Education Data Warehouse’ can provide a comprehensive picture of dental students and detailed information on the content of our curricula and assessments including data, such as gathered from simulators, like the haptic MOOG Simodont Dental Trainer or from virtual case presentation software system, like vpSim (aka Synapse Dx). Following Marc’s ideas about medical education, we could use sophisticated learning analytics to model a person’s ‘educational genome’ based about a dental student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, interests and experiences. Such data analytics could then guide future learning. Here the visualization of such a Dental Education Data Warehouse for “personalized learning”
Fig. 1: Dental Education Data Warehouse
More about the session can be found here.
