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Fully Online
General Chemistry Course Incorporating At Home
Wet Labs, Virtual Labs, Video Lectures, and Web
Conferencing In a recent Sloan Consortium report, it was reported
that 31.3% of higher education students in the US, or 6.14 million students,
took at least one online course in 2010. The number of students taking at least
one online class is rising, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.3% from
2002 to 2010. Online classes offer many advantages. However courses involving a
laboratory component like Chemistry remain a challenge to offer fully online.
Challenges include the need for expensive equipment, difficulty in submitting
non-numerical results and safety concerns. These challenges have been addressed
in an online chemistry class that uses primarily wet labs at home in conjunction
with some virtual online experiments. This presentation discusses lessons
learned from this novel method of teaching chemistry lab fully online. The use
of video lectures, synchronous web conferencing, web homework, and applying the
Quality Matters rubric to the course, will also be discussed. |