APPROACHES IN PROVIDING HIGHLY EFFECTIVE DISTANCE LEARNING AT THE DEPARTMENT OF THERAPEUTIC DENTISTRY, POLTAVA STATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITY
Authors: Ilenko N.M. , Boychenko O.M. , Ilenko-Lobach N.V. 
Published: November 2022

Modern medical education is significantly affected by the nationwide quarantine that has made adjustments to the development and functioning in all sectors of society. Inability to conduct offline full-fledged classes at educational settings contributed to the wider implementation of distance education.

According to the Law of Ukraine "On Higher Education", distance education has the official status of an independent form of education on a par with full-time, extramural and externships.

Modern platforms and services allow educators to continue the educational process at high quality levels during quarantine. Thus, groups in Viber, created for quick transmission of messages at the beginning of the last academic year, are now organically woven into the educational process. The educators at the Department of Therapeutic Stomatology actively use the Viber messenger in cases where there are problems in joining students to electronic courses and providing assistance. The department staff actively uses the services of the Zoom platform to conduct distance learning. Free service with a clear interface enables to actively participate in online meetings. The option of screen sharing allows each participant to receive and contribute their own information to group discussion thus maintaining feedback. In Zoom, it is easy to submit new material, in particular presentations, and check its assimilation by students. The chat can be used for asking quick questions and writing comments during the class. By controlling the chat, educators can add or remove participants, give the right to vote, access to the screen, separate communication. Such classes also foster the communication skills. You can plan the date of the conference [2]. The recording of the conference can be stored in separate folders. In addition, using the Zoom platform, we can hold department meetings, scientific student group meetings, etc. The department staff actively participates in various conferences, meetings of the academic councils using the Zoom platform.

Nevertheless, online education cannot provide the proper question of practical skills. This prompted the search for visual examples and opportunities to demonstrate working with phantoms and patients in the format of distance learning to medical and dental students. Some opportunities in this direction are provided by the YouTube platform. A large number of correspondents provide this platform with an almost immeasurable variety of videos on different topics for students to view materials on the discipline. The videos are specially created for both teachers and students to explain and demonstrate certain concepts, ways of using equipment or dental accessories, the mechanism of action of a medicinal product, etc. Taking into account the above mentioned, we can determine the main ways of the development of the distance learning system: creation of various distance learning programs; increasing the number of open access and free educational distance mass courses, etc. Distance technologies applied in teaching the discipline "Therapeutic Dentistry" enables to enrich the medical training, foster systemic thinking, and to design more flexible student-centred approach.