With the recent launch of education.glidewelldental.com, Glidewell has made it even easier for dental professionals to find the continuing education (CE) courses they seek. In this interview, Susmitha Valvekar, program manager of online training at Glidewell, discusses what differentiates the new site from Glidewell’s previous educational content, along with how Glidewell uses participants’ feedback to create and improve its online education resources.

CHAIRSIDE^® MAGAZINE: With established resources such as Glidewell Clinical Education training centers and the Glidewell Symposium, Glidewell offers a significant number of live CE opportunities. What prompted the company to launch a new education site offering on-demand CE courses?

SUSMITHA VALVEKAR: Busy doctors are looking for courses that they can more easily access and finish at their own pace. We’ve had online learning resources in the form of YouTube videos and courses on learning platforms, but they were not well curated or well organized for the learner. With my background in learning and development, I began thinking of various questions while working on the new site: What are the learners’ needs? What are doctors asking us for? Which topics on our website are getting the most views? The statistics showed us that quite a few people were turning to us for education resources, but we needed to make those resources easier to access.

CM: What makes this new education site different from other continuing education sources, including the on-demand CE courses that have been available on Glidewell’s website for a number of years?

SV: The most immediate advantage of this new site compared to our previous online CE course structure is that we are able to more responsively tap into participants’ needs. Not only have we included a star-rating system so that course participants can provide instant feedback, but we’re also reaching out to doctors and asking them what courses they’re looking for — and then using that feedback to create courses.

CM: How will the new site make accessing CE easier for clinicians and other dental professionals?

SV: On the new site, only a single login is required, so existing customers who already have a Glidewell account can instantly access the content. And if you’re not a customer, and you’re looking for a particular CE course, we’ve worked to improve the keyword and category searchability of the new site. We want all courses to be easy to find and located in one portal.

CM: How have the CE courses on the new site been developed?

SV: We’ve created new courses based on feedback from dental professionals. That incorporation of feedback from people who are actually out in the field is the biggest difference. In addition to clinical content, we’ve added topics that are more reflective of our time, such as how to reach out to millennial patients, and we’re even going to have a couple of doctors come in to discuss how to integrate mindfulness into the dental practice.

CM: What have you found are Glidewell’s most popular online CE subjects and courses?

SV: Implantology is the most popular subject, though crown & bridge is catching up. We’ve also seen significant interest in esthetic dentistry, dentures and dental sleep medicine.

CM: What are Glidewell’s future plans on the online CE front? Will Glidewell be offering more CE resources both online and offline?

SV: We want our online and live education branches to work together. If an online CE course has a lot of hits — for instance, something related to implants — and we know people are very interested in learning more about it, we’ll make sure that topic is covered in a live course that will allow participants to get hands-on experience.

In the online sphere, we want to have more interactive courses — in fact, we’ve been developing an online study club. Through this study club, people will be able to ask questions and interact with instructors in a way that isn’t possible in other online courses. We’re looking to host webinars with a question-and-answer forum for course participants — clinicians can ask the instructor questions at any time, and the instructor will be able to respond to all of those questions. We want to give the participants a more interactive, hands-on experience.

We’ve also started producing webinars and training videos for dental assistants and other office staff members. These videos provide step-by-step guidance for dental staff so that they are as comfortable and efficient as possible when they’re working with the doctor. For example, one of these training videos is about implant surgery setup and addresses several key questions: How do you lay out the surgery tools for the doctor? What are the protocols you need to set up for the doctor before this type of surgery, and how would you assist the doctor with that?

Ultimately, our goal is to create learning platforms for dental professionals that are accessible as well as reliable, while ensuring that our courses provide participants with tools that they can immediately use in their practices.