An online course on Computers in Chemical Education
Daniel C. Tofan
Eastern Kentucky University, Chemistry Department

Introduction

This paper originates from the development of a new graduate (and upper undergraduate) level course created in Fall 2007 at Eastern Kentucky University. The course was offered as Special Topics in Chemical Education.

The main reason for creating this course is double fold. On one hand there is the necessity to train future chemistry teachers in the use of computer technology in order to open their eyes to several different types of software and technologies, and to better prepare them for their future jobs. On the other hand, our own graduate students could use a refresher course in the type of computer software that is used in teaching labs and lecture at our school. This course was designed based on local needs before anything else.

A version of this paper is under consideration for publication in the JCE. For the CONFCHEM newsletter, I wanted to discuss the possibility of creating an online version of the course, which could reach audiences far larger than those at EKU. Also, the online version of the paper allows me to provide links to some of the teaching aids created by students who took the course, and also to other online resources that were used in teaching.

Targeted audience

An online version of the course can reach a more diverse audience than one can expect in an upper level class-based course. Furthermore, the availability of online resources makes this type of course especially appropriate for distance learning.

The course should be sought by Bachelor's students who are preparing for a career in teaching chemistry in high school. It can be used by chemistry departments for their graduate students who serve as TA's to train them in computer software that they use in teaching and perhaps in research. It can be useful to chemical educators who are looking to learn some programming skills in order to extract information from a database. Finally, it can be used as a means of spreading the word about "cool" things that can be used in teaching chemistry, which not all teachers may have heard about, or have learned how to use.

Topics

The list of topics suggested below is just a particular set that I chose for the initial development of this course. Clearly, it can be expanded to a lot more than this. In choosing the topics below, I focused mainly on what I use day by day. Other people may find other topics worthy of teaching others.

Web building

Most people know how to create a website. Building one from scratch is not a complicated task, and finding the right tools is one of the important steps. I personally use DreamWeaver CS3, but when cost is an issue, there is a free program called 1stPage 2006 (formerly known as 1stPage 2000) which does a pretty good job. This version works under Vista and its user interface is rich and friendly (more so than Dreamweaver, I would say). For the price, this full fledged editor is hard to beat. The image below shows the basic user interface. Clicking on it will bring up the full image.

The typical assignment that I use for this topic consists of asking students to build a personal web page. They usually start by listing a number of interesting and/or useful chemistry sites, then continue to enrich the page as the course progresses, thus creating an online portfolio.

Course management

We use Blackboard at EKU, which is probably the main CMS out there. One of the resources that I always use in Bb consists of question pools for online quizzes in General Chemistry. I often create my own question pools, and algorithmic questions are desirable for such pools. Students are usually not familiar with the Blackboard instructor's view, and so creating questions and deploying them in actual assessments was an interesting exercise. Of course, Bb access is required, which would be the case for any CMS. This topic would be more problematic for an online course.

Office programs

In 2007, Office 2007 was brand new on our campus, and many people were puzzled by the new look and feel. It seemed appropriate to dedicate some class time going over some of the new features (new to the instructor as well as to the students). The one notable thing (in my opinion) in Word 2007 is the way Microsoft has improved their equation editor, which makes it a lot easier now to type equations using subscript and superscripts. An alternative to using the Word editor is the FX Chem package from efofex software. The tool installs on top of MS Word and allows one to type chemical symbolism in-line, while converting them into a graphical object inside the document. It can be a bit more cumbersome to use, and it comes at a small additional cost (about $20 for a year-long subscription), but it offers more possibilities for writing reactions and other symbolism.

Excel is one of the most widely used tools in chemistry, an example being Scott Sinex's paper on Excelets in the previous Newsletter. From a teacher's point of view, even something simple such as how to create a grade book that uses VLOOKUP functions is worth teaching.

PowerPoint is probably used by everybody nowadays, leaving little to talk about. The image below is a simple diagram illustrating electron transfer in ionic bond formation, which can be built in 10 minutes using PowerPoint. Click for a large version.

A viable (and, more importantly, free) alternative to Microsoft Office is the OpenOffice package by Sun Microsystems. It offers most of the same functionality of MS Office, and it is open source. Below are some screenshots taken from their website, representing the five main programs in the suite.

Access and SQL

Databases are used less frequently in teaching chemistry and in chemical education in general. I use Access databases for many things, one example being lab management, described in a 2005 paper. Not many teachers would be involved in laboratory management, and certainly there are many ways to go about this, but I find that the tasks listed below are almost impossible to complete without using the Structured Query Language (SQL) and a database product.

• Find a student's attendance record for all experiments by ID number or name
• Find all students who had attended a particular experiment; display date attended, date and time, workstation number; sort alphabetically
• Find all students who missed a particular experiment; sort alphabetically
• Find students who missed more than one third of all experiments
• Find how many students attended lab each day the lab was open; sort by experiment number, then by day of the week
• Find which students worked at a particular workstation during a given week; display student info, day and time attended
• List all the majors of the students enrolled in the lab and how many students for each major; sort high to low
• Find what unknowns were assigned to a particular student in a given experiment
• Find the average time spent by students on each experiment
• Generate a report showing the results obtained by all students for a particular experiment

Using some sample data and an SQL tutorial created by W3 Schools, students were able to create queries that provided almost all of the data requested above. Although I prefer Access 2007 because it is robust, it reates one-file databases, and it has good user interface capabilities, there are free database products that offer most of the same capabilities, despite using slightly different flavors of SQL. One example is MySQL.

The following set of tutorials were made by folks at Florida Gulf State University and cover the Office 2007 products in great detail:

• Word 2007
• Excel 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Access 2007

XML

The purpose of XML is to mark up structured data. It is mostly used by applications, but I felt I had to mention this important topic in a course on computers in chemical education. To give the students an idea about where XML could be useful to us chemists, while avoiding going into stuff like the Chemical Markup Language, we decided to start building a periodic table in XML - the perfect candidate for structured data. This worked less well than I had hoped, and I describe this project in detail in my other paper on the Periodic Table. While many tools can be used to generate and edit XML, I found XMLShell to be the most versatile, although not free. The most notable feature was the ability to freely copy, paste, and move nodes within the XML structure, in tree view, while also providing a text-based view.

Drawing software

Freeware programs such as ISISDraw (discontinued) and ChemSketch 11 are popular for drawing organic structures in particular. Most students are already familiar with these programs so there is not a lot of novelty here. We stayed away from full fledged programs such as ChemDraw for economic reasons, although this particular one is clearly superior.

Adobe Illustrator can be used to draw various types of equipment and diagrams. I am publishing a 3-part tutorial in Computing in Science and Engineering on this subject. As with most Adobe software, Illustrator is expensive and it also has a relatively steep learning curve.

Virtual labs

The ChemCollective Virtual Lab is a great Java applet for virtual lab simulations. The nice part about this program is that it can be used online (the Java Runtime Environment from Sun is required for the program to run) to explore a number of properties of solutions. It also comes with pre-made virtual experiments that accept online submission of results by students.

Creating new experiments using the Virtual Lab was an interesting assignment. The VL comes with an authoring tool that can be used to create new problems. The cumbersome part about it is that it uses XML (one of the reasons to cover it prior to this) to set up new lab problems for deployment. It is not very difficult to use, however, once past the initial learning curve. The number of properties that can be measured is limited, and the "species concentration meter" can bother some people, since it is not something that has a real life equivalent.

Vernier LoggerPro

Adobe Captivate

Captivate is another program from Adobe (not part of any of the Adobe collections, unfortunately). It captures mouse movements and keyboard strokes and creates animated tutorials in a storyboard-like fashion. The output is Flash files, which can be easily embedded into HTML pages for rendering online. Narration can be added as soundtrack, which makes it really useful for creating distance learning materials. We used it to create a few tutorials for LoggerPro. I am working on creating a comprehensive set of such tutorials, which may end up being a commercial product. For now, I provide a link to a Flash file that illustrates some of the tutorials we created as part of this course, in the "Student projects" section.

Because of licensing costs (I only had one license available), using this tool in an online course could be problematic.

Java

Java programming was my original idea for a course on computers in ChemEd, which I abandoned due to the fact that it would probably have taken more than one semester to teach Java programming to students without a background in computing. A special topics course could not be implemented as a two semester sequence, so this topic was not feasible. For an online course, however, I can see two directions.

Java applets. This can be a standalone topic. Applets are pre-made pieces of software which run inside a browser. There is not much work or knowledge required in order to put an applet on a website. Usually, applets are easily configurable through parameters given in an <applet> tag. Those parameters depend on the function of the applet, which is usually documented by the author. There are many useful applets in chemistry, one example being Jmol, an open source viewer for chemical structures.

Java programming. To properly teach Java programming, even at beginner level, a semester-long course (or equivalent) is necessary, in my opinion. No assumptions can be made about students' background in programming. Even with some previous programming background, Java is an object oriented language, and its constructs are different than procedural or other languages out there. However, Java is a very powerful language and it can be very useful in scientific applications. Again, the Jmol applet is an illustration of the power of Java and its applicability in chemistry.

In a ChemEd course, Java applications would be simple and oriented towards improving teaching. For example, I wrote a very simple quadratic equation solver, which students in my General Chemistry II course use to solve quadratic equations in acid-base equilibrium problems. A molar mass calculator is another example of a simple applications. These would be some of the goals of teaching Java to chemistry teachers. People who are serious about creating more powerful and useful applications can learn the full language, but for a novice, there should be enough to build a foundation on which to expand later if desired.

Course delivery and assessment

A website specifically created for the course is the easiest solution, however it cannot restrict access to just students taking the course. Such a feature could be important for uploading of assignments. I am not aware whether any course management system allows students from different institutions to enroll in the same course, so it seems to me that an online offering of such a course would have to be institution specific.

As far as assessment is concerned, uploading assignments electronically should work well. In the class based course I required presentations of literature papers and student-created projects. This could still be achieved by uploading PowerPoint presentations for peers to look at and comment. Examinations can be delivered online, of course. It seems that some form of course management tool is needed, which suggests that a course open to more than one institution at a time is not really feasible at the moment.

Peer review and evaluation of assignments is probably going to play an important role in an online course. This would save the instructor precious time, and it would allow students to critically evaluate their peers' contributions. Considering the intended audience for this course, peer review is very desirable anyway.

Student projects

I wanted to give some examples of student completed projects during the first two offerings of the class-based version of this course. Most of these are in the form of poster-size PowerPoint files, which can be printed directly to their actual size, or reduced. Others are links to web based resources, which are best seen online. Feel free to comment about the usefulness of each project, and suggest possible avenues of improvement and/or expansion directions.

Nomenclature website

General Chemistry I concept review

Calculation of pH in Acid-Base Titrations

Determination of the pH of a solution

LoggerPro tutorials in Flash (as given to the BCCE this summer)

Timeline of the discovery of the elements

 

Conclusions

I have outlined a possible online course on computers in chemical education, based on a class version already taught twice. I am looking for suggestions for possible additions and improvements to this course, and for ideas on how such a course could be offered at other institutions through distance education. I am interested in teaching this course online, and develop a print and/or live textbook for it.

Return to the contents page of the Fall 2008 issue of the Computers in Chemical Education Newsletter.