Advanced Education In General Dentistry

About AEGD

Rationale

Postdoctoral General Dentistry (PGD) programs are one-year post-DDS degree programs fully accredited by the Commission on Dental Accreditation of the American Dental Association. The goals of the PGD programs are to train Primary Oral Health Care practitioners who will:

  1. Use evidence-based clinical decision-making in their practices.
  2. Treat their patients in the context of family, culture and, community.
  3. Develop the practice of lifetime learning in order to continuously improve their ability to care for their patients.

Currently there are only enough postdoctoral training program positions for about half of each year's dental school graduates. A major barrier to increasing the number of training positions is that sites that can offer clinical training are often unable to provide the didactic curriculum to satisfy accreditation requirements. The number of training and service positions could be expanded if a high quality distance educational curriculum were available for implementation by PGD programs.

Project Goal

It is the goal of the PGD distance education project to develop methods of education that achieve the above educational goals and are appropriate for training residents who spend the greatest part of the time at remote sites. To meet this goal, the Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery is developing, with funding from a HRSA grant, a modular web-based distance teaching program consisting of online and hybrid CD-ROM-based streaming video lectures, web-based tutorials, full-text articles, case reviews, and discussion forums, that can be adapted and implemented by any PGD program. In addition, each module will be supported by a teaching and discussion faculty guide as well as collaborative tools to support discussion among the faculty and the module author.