Flipped Classroom in Oral Surgery Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

The flipped classroom is a strategy for educating oral surgery residents where theoretical or didactic learning takes place during class preparation, and the class is used to apply, discuss, and practice with faculty guidance. This can be compared to the traditional passive delivery of lecture-based education in traditional classrooms. Preliminary findings from the dental and medical education literature indicate that flipped classrooms can improve the retention of knowledge, development of practical or procedural skills, clinical reasoning, and engagement of students. The potential for pre-class online activities to enhance a resident’s preparedness for a clinical procedure, increase confidence, and allow residents to work collaboratively on problems is worthy of exploration. Challenges include time demands to develop resources, variations in student preparedness or engagement, changing faculty roles, and technology barriers. Although research specifically focusing on oral surgery and the flipped classroom is lacking, the findings to date are promising in terms of the acquisition of skills and satisfaction with learning. Further research should study the long-term impacts of the curriculum on clinical competence, patient outcomes, and resident experience. This article reviews the ideas and ways in which flipped classrooms can be used in oral surgery education, along with potential benefits and limitations, current evidence for their implementation, and suggestions for their implementation and future research areas.