Hygiene Class Utilizes Innovative New Video System The Thursday afternoon session of Dental Hygiene course DH210 has been underway for about an hour as faculty member Martha McComas goes from student to student. She is watching the first-year students practice the proper techniques for using different dental scalers and is demonstrating how to reach various teeth on their typodont models. The conversation is filled with DH lingo. “Bring your hand more towards your right, so get up on your fulcrum finger a little more,” McComas tells one student. “There … not out, but up. Keep going, keep going, right there.” Another student asks: “So when you get toward the mesial buccal, that’s when you want to start rotating?” “That’s right,” McComas answers, watching the student’s hand movements. “There you go, that’s better. Because if you keep going straight without rolling and adapting your fulcrum, then that point is going to be out in the gingiva and that’s going to be painful. Looks good, looks really good. Let’s go on to another area …” 16 DENTAL HYGIENE M Dentistry | Fall 2020
It’s a typical instructional conversation that’s been held countless times between DH faculty and students, except for one big difference on this day: The participants are not at the School of Dentistry or even in the same room. The students are practicing in their apartments around southeast Michigan, and McComas is offering her expertise from the living room of her home in Dexter. She is watching a series of video feeds that allow her to see a close-up of each student’s hands as they practice on their typodont. In return, students can watch McComas demonstrate proper technique on her typodont. DH faculty and students are using this innovative and newly developed video system in response to limitations created by the COVID-19 pandemic. New protocols allow fewer students to be in the Simulation Lab and clinics at once, so McComas knew by mid-summer that faculty would need a mix of in-person and online instruction, rather than the pre-pandemic routine, which was entirely in-person. Lectures
and many classroom courses are fairly easy to convert to virtual Zoom meetings, but hands-on demonstrations that would normally have been done in the Sim Lab or Foundations Clinic are much more difficult to move online. McComas, a clinical associate professor, began experimenting at home with how a Zoom meeting on her laptop computer could be paired with a second video feed using the camera on an iPad. She configured a tripod to hold the iPad so that its camera pointed down at her typodont. Through “lots of trial and error” she got close to a process that she thought might work. It requires the faculty member to alternate between talking to students on Zoom, then pivoting to demonstrate procedures on the iPad camera, making sure to switch back-and-forth between the proper settings so that everyone can see and hear both functions at the proper times. McComas enlisted the help of Adam Barragato, lead instructional learner in the school’s Dental Informatics department. He
