This abstract describes how a variety or web-enhanced activities were implemented in two blended general chemistry courses at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston (MA) to improve students' time on task during the lectures and motivation to learn chemistry. One of the chemistry courses is called Chemistry of the Built Environment (Chem120) and it is offered as a required 4-credit course in the first year of an undergraduate Construction management program.  The other was offered as a science elective to students from different undergraduate majors including management, computer science and civil engineering and was named Virtual Chemistry (Chem406). Both courses were offered in a blended format. In Chem120 25% of the lectures and 25% of the face-to-face wet lab sessions did not require attendance and were substituted by a variety of virtual lab activities, web enhanced experiences of different level of difficulty and take-home exams or projects. Chem406 did not have wet labs and 50% of the face-to-face time was used to perform computational labs from the Concord consortium, other web-enhanced applications and applications, answer questions related to the power point presentations posted on blackboard every week (but not used by the professor to lecture) or for review sessions for the take-home exams. The other 50% of course time did not require attendance and was used by students to perform project take-home exams (with embedded simulations from the web) and small projects that students had to deliver by power point presentation or by writing essays. The favorite virtual activities included the radiation lab (www.visualsimulations.co.uk), and the computational labs developed by the Concord Consortium using Molecular workbench (http://concord.org/). Students' evaluations, class attendance and students' participation were better in these blended courses than in those delivered 100% face-to-face by the same instructor. Average students' grades were not significantly different.

Integration of virtual labs, simulations, and lectures to improve students' time on task and learning in blended undergraduate chemistry courses

246th National Meeting (2013)

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