This study details the efforts taken
in remotely teaching a large
organic chemistry lecture course in the midst of the recent COVID-19
pandemic. The course lectures were taught synchronously via Zoom and
student feedback was gathered regarding effective teaching strategies
and assessment tools in a remote course setting. The precourse and
midcourse surveys also provided insight into challenges and time commitment
issues that students are facing when learning in this new situation.
We highlight the instructor’s experience combined with student
perspectives to tackle this situation moving forward. We hope that
this work can assist faculty in remotely teaching their chemistry
courses, and contribute to the information that is being collected
globally regarding remote learning in light of the recent events.
Numerous online resources provide
a variety of content for a wide
range of STEM topics; however, they tend to function as isolated tidbits
that provide content-specific knowledge. Application-based science
education videosaddress the overlooked issue of concept to application
by implementing experimental components in their videos and fostering
connections with everyday applications. We utilized the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) peer-reviewed science
education videos as homework assignments to supplement lectures on
the topics of enthalpy, entropy, rate laws, and Le Châtelier’s
principle in a second-term general chemistry course. Student learning
was assessed through the analysis of pre- and post-video conceptual
quizzes, and value surveys were also conducted to gather student feedback
about the videos. Our investigation shows that using these videos
in the course significantly improved student learning and reinforced
conceptual understanding for important foundational concepts, and
these results hold even for students who did not feel positively toward
the videos.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the world, how people interact, and the way business is conducted. Higher education is no exception; as institutions quickly shifted to remote teaching in Spring 2020, many faculty needed to support student learning in ways that were new to them.
The synthesis of small boron oxide nanoparticles (NPs) is reported. A sonochemical approach in the presence of a capping agent was employed to produce approximately 4-5-nm-sized BO NPs, including the B isotopically enriched form. The morphology and composition of the NPs were established using transmission electron microscopy and diffraction, respectively. X-ray photoelectron and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies provided information about surface functionalization of the BO NPs, which can be further modified through a facile, one-step ligand-exchange process. The toxicity of the synthesized NPs was investigated in Chinese hamster ovarian cells, indicating that these systems were nontoxic up to 1.7 mM concentrations.
We report our discovery of utilizing perhydroxylated dodecaborate clusters ([B12(OH)12]2-) as a molecular cross-linker to generate a hybrid tungsten oxide material. The reaction of [B12(OH)12]2- with WCl6, followed by subsequent...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.