Use of computers among students of dental college in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Background:The Riyadh Colleges of Dentistry and Pharmacy (RCSDP) is in the process of implementing a total computer based information system to improve the delivery of curricula, clinical teaching and administration. In order to measure the level of acceptance and the degree of training that would be required, a survey was undertaken to investigate the current knowledge and skills of students with respect to information communication technology (ICT). Materials and Methods: Data collection took place by means of a questionnaire which included items on computer access, computer skills and training, computer activities used for study at college, internet access and activities involving the internet and dentistry. Results: An overall response rate of 81.8% (226 out of 276) was obtained. Besides having free and unlimited access to computers at the college, 82.7% of the students had access to computers at home also and 93% owned their own laptop. About 63.7% students gained their knowledge about computers from personal study and experience. Academic uses of the computer were mainly by PowerPoint programs (61%) and 91% had access to Internet. Around 85% preferred lectures to be available on the college website. Google was the most commonly used search engine (60%), and only 10% accessed PubMed or other medical and dental sites for academic purposes. Conclusion: It can thus be concluded that students of RCSDP had adequate access to substantial ICT resources and demonstrated an excellent attitude towards the computer and Internet technology. However, the educational use of ICT among these students has great scope for improvement.

Computer and internet use by the undergraduate medical students of Bangladesh

“…The respondents mentioned Google (62.5%), Wikipedia (39.6%), YouTube (16.7%), Yahoo (12.5%) and Facebook (6.3%) as their mostly visited sites/webs for academic purposes. This simulates closely with that dental college students of Saudi Arabia (Rahman, 2011) and Jordan (Rajab & Baqain, 2005) where PubMed and Hotmail MSN were also the other leading…”

“…Majority (76.4%) of them used computers for more than 3 years which is similar with a very recently published Saudi Arabian study (Rahman, 2011), but grossly dissimilar with the results obtained from studies in Manchester, Bristol and New Castle of UK, where 20%, 14% and 57% students respectively were reported to use the computer for more than three years (Grigg, 2001). This may be attributed to the fact that these three studies in UK were conducted more than a decade ago and the use of computer might have increased since then.…”

“…But it closely mimics with those of 95% undergraduate dental students in Oulu, Finland (Virtanen & Nieminen ,2002), followed by 94% of medical students from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Mansor ,2002), 86.6% of the dental students of Lagos, Nigeria (Butali,2011) and 84% of undergraduate students in Glasgow, United Kingdom (UK) (Jones, 1991).Computer access in this study is higher than those of 71.7% of first year medical students of Denmark (Dorup ,2004), 61% medical students from Malaysia (Nurjahan et al, 2002) and 58.3% of the dental students of India (Kumar et al, 2009). Internet access of our final year MBBS students mimics closely with dental students of university of Jordan (100%) (Rajab & Baqain, 2005), medical students of Burla, India (80%) (Mahraana et al, 2009), dental students and registrars of Lagos (95%) (Butali, 2011) and Saudi Arabia (91.1%) (Rahman, 2011). Computer and internet access to the medical students depend on multiple factors like institutional set up, curriculum need, cost of products and logistics, socio economic status, motivation and the time need.…”

“…Multimedia/power point use (61.2%), internet literature search (42.3%), presentations (25.8%), and word processing (23.2%) reported. The highest used feature of computer was Internet (85.8%) (Rajab & Baqain, 2005), Internet (60.4%) (Kumar, 2012), MS power point (61.06%) (Rahman, 2011), Internet (85.7%) (Butali, 2011) and word processing (55%) (Nurjahan et al, 2002). Weekly average time spent by the respondents in computer and internet for academic purposes were up to 3 hours (51.5%), 4-6 hours (18.2%) and 10 hours or more (9.0%) which was consistent with an South Indian study (Unnikrishnan et al, 2008) where 63% of the pre final and final year MBBS students spent up to 3 hours in a week with computer and online for academic purposes.…”

Knowledge and attitude about computer and internet usage among dental students in Western Rajasthan, India

“…[5] Information and communication technology is an increasingly important tool in dental education. [6] Several studies have shown the potential use of computers, IT and internet in dental curriculum as an educational tool.…”