Making the Case for Open Dental Education

Dental education as a field and dentistry as a profession are facing significant challenges, including workforce shortages, ever-rising costs, unmet student and community needs, as well as quality of pedagogical practices. Open educational resources are learning objects that are freely accessible and are able to be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed under the philosophy of more openness and sharing. While some efforts are being made to address the aforementioned concerns, the prospects of more readily welcoming and adopting open education have not been discussed as a potential means of alleviating these barriers. Here, we expound on some of the challenges facing dental education and how open educational resources can help address these challenges. Given the reduced barriers and technological advantages, open educational resources and the adoption of more openness in dental education can alleviate some of the individual, institutional, and overall challenges faced by the field of dentistry and the oral healthcare enterprise as a whole.