You spend enough time on the road. The last thing you need is to be trapped behind the wheel of your car in heavy traffic trying to get to a full-day seminar, where they serve bitter coffee, only allow a few 15-minute breaks, and educate you with as much enthusiasm as a funeral director.
Fortunately, dental CE courses online allow you to skip that tedium and enjoy the perks of earning your credits at home or any other location that is most conducive to your learning style.
More importantly, you can still benefit from connecting with your peers — thanks to revolutionary improvements to online education.
What Does Taking Dental CE Courses Online Look Like?
Traditional online learning may not always be engaging or fulfilling. Fortunately, today there is a concept called digitally delivered, collaboration-enhanced learning. What exactly is that?
Digitally Delivered Education
One drawback of traditional online learning is the lack of hands-on practice in a real-life simulated environment.
Regardless of your learning style, digitally delivered dental courses online provide visual, auditory, and kinesthetic components. By physically practicing the skills you learn, you are more likely to retain the information.
More importantly, since the practical exercises take place at home, there are no limitations on how many times you can run through new procedures. The biggest benefit of this style of learning is that when you find yourself in a stressful situation at work, you're able to easily recall the knowledge and let your muscle memory take over.
Collaboration-Enhanced Learning
The best learning comes from lively discussion and friendly competition within a community of your peers. With collaboration-enhanced learning, you can leverage community chat spaces so there's a continuous feedback loop between educators and students. This type of online dentistry course delivery promotes open-ended dialogues that increase learning.
So, now you know what digitally delivered learning is, but how will it benefit you? Keep reading to find out!
Top 4 Benefits of Taking Dental CE Courses Online
1. Delivers Flexibility and Productivity
One of the main benefits of online dental courses is the flexibility it allows within your schedule. People are busier than ever and trying to find time to fit in extra learning can be such a headache, especially for dentists.
All week you’re working with patients, and if you were doing in-person courses, you’d have to book time off or sacrifice the majority of your weekend so that you can try and improve your dentistry.
Not only does online learning fit around your schedule but it’s been proven to be much more productive as well. Techjury reports that e-learning takes 40% to 60% less time compared to traditional education modalities and delivers retention rates of 25% to 60%, while people doing in-person training were only retaining 8% to 10% of the information.
2. Improves Motivation and Determination
It’s never easy to do something you don’t particularly want to do. Of course, this extends to hitting the books and studying when you might just want to curl up and binge on Netflix.
Self-motivation is incredibly useful in life and often increases career achievement. However, it is very much like a muscle. The more you work to improve it, the better chance you have at focusing on the task at hand and getting things done.
Online learning is a great way to train yourself to be self-disciplined and learn habits that can be applied in other areas of your life. Online learning teaches you how to prioritize your time, be self-sufficient, and demonstrate your ambition to improve yourself.
3. Helps Build Global Relationships
An online platform specifically designed for dental education can offer a place to exchange expert opinions, advice, and learning without having to hop on a plane.
Digitally delivered learning allows us to have insightful discussions with people from a range of different backgrounds, not just those who had time to turn up to an in-person training session.
You can easily meet people around the world in a global chat community of dentists. Whether you are discussing cases or issues or having healthy discussions about and beyond the content you are learning in your online dentistry courses, you learn diverse viewpoints and discover the best ways of tackling topics and challenges.
4. More Affordable
Overhead costs of in-person learning are significant. Students are not only paying for access to the educational content but they’re paying the teacher’s salary, their transportation costs, the rent of the venue, food and beverage provided, and any other underlying costs that spring up. When those costs are eliminated, taking dental CE courses online makes much more sense.
Selecting the Right Online Dental Courses for You
Like performing dental procedures, choosing the right dental course should be based on more than a gut feeling. As part of your research, look for opportunities to sample the education at no cost.
At RipeGlobal, we offer free Masterclasses designed to provide valuable learning in a short amount of time. Taught by some of the world’s best educators who are also dentists just like you, each Masterclass lets you experience how RipeGlobal is fast-tracking dental careers globally.
Discover the next Masterclass topic and register for free.
