Letters to the Editor

Readers may be interested to learn about a collaborative project between NHS Education for Scotland, the university dental schools and the dental therapy schools in Scotland – Scottish Dental Education Online (SDEO).

SDEO was established in 2008 to support the collaborative development of high-quality digital learning resources, covering curricular topics which are either difficult to teach or which can benefit from the use of technological features such as 2D and 3D animations, video and interactive self-assessments. Development is by small teams of experts in each partner university working closely with a professional learning technologist. Resources go through a two-stage quality assurance process to ensure that they are of high quality, accurate, up-to-date, developed to agreed technical standards and specifications and meet ethical and legal requirements. Resources fall into three categories:

Access to all of these resources is free and via both the SDEO website, and the NHS Education for Scotland’s platform for learning and support resources. In 2019, the site received over 6,800 visits (up by about 1000 from 2018), with the majority accessing the learning packages (46.7%), VM (16.1%), learning objects (3.3%), and administrative resources such as meeting notes, website statistics, etc (5.1%). The ‘bounce rate’ was 33%. The majority of visits are from the UK (91%), USA (2%), Malaysia (2%), India, China, Germany, France, Netherlands (each 1%) and all other countries <1%. Eighty-four percent of users accessed resources from a desktop computer and 16% from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.