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Students face various challenges in organic chemistry, including learning complex organic chemistry concepts, applying them to solve problems, and navigating curved arrow notation to depict organic chemistry mechanisms. Given these challenges, many chemistry education practitioners and researchers have focused their efforts on implementing and assessing pedagogical practices that can produce positive outcomes for all students. In this chapter, we describe flipped classroom pedagogy as an evidence-based practice in organic chemistry that has improved student outcomes and addressed learning challenges in the course. We also review key aspects of this practice. In addition, we focus on group activities since they are a common component of flipped classrooms. We will present a case study that analyzes students' reasoning through dialogue when they were engaged in a group quiz activity that was a component of a flipped organic chemistry course. Through the results of this case study, we will make suggestions for how group activities can be implemented to improve students' reasoning skills in organic chemistry.
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Online Course Quality Rubric: A Tool Box
This online course quality rubric was developed to provide a systematic and descriptive benchmark for researchers and practitioners who are striving to develop a culture of high-quality college-level online courses. This rubric differentiates itself from others as it identifies the unique challenges associated with learning in a virtual environment and provides concrete details of how to optimize the design features and instructional practices to ease the challenges. Practitioners and researchers increasingly acknowledge two critical challenges to successful online teaching and learning: the need for stronger self-directed learning skills and greater difficulties in enabling effective interpersonal interactions. These challenges call for the importance of better scaffolding the self-directed learning skills necessary for online success as well as providing clear guidance to navigate the learning process, promoting student agency to engage students actively throughout their learning, and improving presence & interactivity intentionally and visibly. Recognizing the critical role of these three concepts in addressing the unique challenges of online learning, this rubric intends to explain how a particular course component (e.g., learning objective) can be designed to address these concepts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1750386
- PAR ID:
- 10232436
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Online Learning Research Center
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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