Examining Knowledge and Attitudes of Faculty Members about E-Learning at Tabriz Dental School in 2016

There is little information on web based teaching tools in dentistry education and the effectiveness of these new methods and technologies in teaching and research, is being discussed. This study was thus designed to determine the knowledge and attitudes of faculty members of Tabriz Dental School towards e-learning.

This is a descriptive cross-sectional study and the study tool was a questionnaire. The validity of this questionnaire was examined by specialists in this field. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to assess the reliability of the questions. In this descriptive cross-sectional study, all faculty members of the Dentistry Faculty at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences were asked to complete a questionnaire. The data were analyzed using SPSS 21 and a p value of less than 0.05 was considered significant.

The knowledge of faculty members in Tabriz Dental School about e-learning was as follows: 38.86% was high, 48.13% moderate and 13.01% low. The attitude of faculty members in Tabriz Dental School about e-learning was as follows: 18.7% completely agreed, 44.0% agreed, 16.6% had no idea, 15.8% disagreed, and 1.4% completely disagreed. there was no significant difference between groups by gender, educational group and academic level. (p> 0.05).

In general, the knowledge of faculty members of Tabriz Dental School toward wed- based teaching was low. However, their attitude toward that was positive.