The university is in a stage of great changes, especially with the inclusion of new technologies that are infused in the current society. Higher education in the United States and Puerto Rico has not been unaware of these changes. Currently, a great variety of publications have been presented, where a tendency can be seen in applying new technologies in science courses. Many universities worldwide have chosen to venture into the mode of creating online courses. Although there is a great demand for offering courses in the online modality, it is also true that chemistry courses are mostly limited to some branches of science. Also, they are designed to students seeking chemistry degrees or needing to fill core curriculum requirements in science. Due to both the complexity of an organic chemistry course as well as that traditional methods used by many professors for teaching are in-person, the creation of a standalone online course represents one of the major challenges for the Chemistry Department of the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamon. This initiative represents an open window for our UPR system where none of the eleven units have available an online organic chemistry course to undergraduate students. Thus, from this perspective what our department is doing is significant, even though the laboratory component will remain in the traditional way. Based on the experience gained in a pilot project using the online Connect platform provided by the publishing house McGraw-Hill, we commenced the development of the online organic chemistry course using the free Moodle platform. In this document, we will present our experience during the development of this course and some of the most significant challenges that we must overcome in order to achieve the success of it.

Development of an online organic chemistry course and the most faced challenges

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.