Development and status of e-Learning program at Tokyo Dental College

This article reports the development and current status of an e-Learning system (hereafter, referred to as "ELS") at Tokyo Dental College. The ELS was developed to promote self-study. In order to achieve this, all new students were encouraged to use a notebook PC, and an intramural IT environment providing full, wireless LAN Web access was established. One key aspect of the ELS is the inclusion of a series of organically integrated lectures. This system represents a new departure in the development of fully technology-integrated dental education, providing a program which allows the student to select "unified themes" which incorporate those tackled in the standard curriculum as "systematic subjects". Integrated learning is further enhanced, as the system contains "topic spaces" which allow access to all related topics and information throughout the entire system in order to support cross-sectional learning by each student. The system was developed based on the following 2 criteria: 1) there must be relevance to the standard syllabus; and 2) the contents must be relevant to problem-based training. The results have indicated that the ELS is effective and helpful to the students, and there are plans to expand the contents of the system. Further refinements of the system should make it even easier to use for both students and teachers.