The Marquette University School of Dentistry has received a $1.37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish the Open Dental Education Consortium to help standardize dental education and decrease the cost of tuition.
With this award, MUSoD will form a consortium with Chippewa Valley Technical College and Milwaukee Area Technical College in Wisconsin, and Brigham Young University in Utah. The target population will be students of all levels of dental programs, including predoctoral DDS/DMD, dental hygiene and dental assisting.
“A major gap exists in open education such that open educational resources as a philosophy or practice have not been incorporated at scale into dental education,” said Dr. Elisabeta Karl, associate dean of academic affairs and Marquette’s principal investigator on the award. “Faculty members at the consortium institutions will collaborate with student instructional designers to develop the curriculum, which will benefit dental students from both two-year degree granting institutions and doctoral level provider programs. We estimate ODEC to save each student $1,000 during this grant period.”
Members of ODEC will target training and faculty development opportunities to educate faculty and stakeholders about open educational resources. Faculty members interested in creating and/or adopting these resources for their courses will be paired with graduate student instructional designers to create high quality and high impact open educational resources and transition to their use in the creation of faculty courses. ODEC will host a repository for all dental education open resources that are a result of this project and others who will join over the years through opendentaled.org, an alias site of EdTech Books.
Karl is collaborating with Dr. Casey Wright, formerly of MUSoD, on the award. Wright is now an assistant professor and director of behavioral sciences and scholarly activity at Pacific Northwest University.
“Marquette School Dentistry is proud of Dr. Karl and Dr. Wright for taking the lead with consortium partners for this promising award from the U.S. Department of Education,” said Dr. Elsbeth Kalenderian, dean of MUSoD. “What ODEC aims to do is standardize high quality dental education and create tuition savings for students facing financial barriers to entering dental training. When so many communities are facing a shortage of dentists, this grant touches the heart of Marquette University’s mission of access to education.”
The long-term goal is for ODEC resources to be adopted in dental education institutions throughout the United States and, as more resources are created and adopted, throughout the world. The consortium hopes each member institution will convert at least 25% of its curriculum to an open educational model within three years. In so doing, at least 530 students will save a minimum of $1,000 each.
The consortium will collaborate with other technical colleges and dental schools to increase consortium membership throughout the grant, leading to greater savings and impact. In addition, it is anticipated that student performance and engagement and use will increase, ultimately resulting in improved student learning.
