Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Publisher

American Dental Education Association

Source Publication

Journal of Dental Education

Source ISSN

0022-0337

Abstract

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.

Comments

Published version. Journal of Dental Education (2026): 1-4. DOI. This article is © 2026 The Author(s). Journal of Dental Education published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Dental Education Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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