The Attitudes of Faculty Members and Students of Dentistry at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Sciences, towards Virtual Education of Theoretical Courses during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020

The prevalence of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has thus far forced most schools and universities to change their conventional teaching methods and to encourage virtual education. The present study aimed to investigate the attitudes of faculty members and students of dentistry, at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Science, towards virtual education of theoretical courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this study, a total number of 300 faculty members and students of dentistry, at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Science, meeting the inclusion and exclusion criteria were recruited. The sampling was also performed using proportional stratified random sampling technique. The data were further collected by an electronic designed questionnaire which its validity and reliability were approved referred to Tabatabaee et. Al study with Cronbach α=0.7 using test-retest method. The results were analysed via the independent-samples t-test and Q-square test.

Among the participants, 96 cases (32%) were faculty members and 204 individuals (68%) were students of dentistry. Of the faculty members, there were 40 men (41.7%) and 56 women (58.3%). With regard to the students’ gender, 86 respondents (42.2%) were male and 118 cases (57.8%) were female. Out of 204 students, 83 cases (40.7%) were enrolled in the basic science courses and 121 respondents (59.3%) were taking clinical ones. With regard to the virtual education of theoretical courses, the attitudes of the faculty members and the students of dentistry in terms of the effectiveness of virtual education and the associated factors as well as the subjective-emotional factors demonstrated a significant difference (p<0.05), Nevertheless, the attitudes of the faculty members and the students on the challenges of virtual education were not significantly different (p>0.05).

According to the study results, virtual education can be practiced as favorable among faculty members compared with students of dentistry. Failure to establish face-to-face communication between teachers and students along with hardware problems can be thus deemed as barriers in this respect.