UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank challenged educators across campus to imagine curricular innovations that could bring students seeking an in-person experience, especially in lab courses, the ability to do so safely. This seminar will describe innovations within our own analytical undergraduate chemistry program to answer the Chancellor’s call, which facilitated group work and self-discovery of concepts between two lecture sections: one section with lab curriculum entirely delivered as synchronous remote meetings, while the other section met fully in-person to conduct hands-on experiments. Students participating in the “in-person” experience served as the experimentalists and learned laboratory techniques as the carried out experiments and collected data for subsequent analysis, while the students enrolled in the synchronous remote lab experience engaged as the theoretical specialists and developed expertise in experimental design, data processing of larger data sets, and modeling chemistry phenomenon. The curriculum facilitates a semester-long collaboration between the experimentalists and the theoretical specialists and seeks to teach and model how modern scientific collaborations are currently carried out in the greater scientific community throughout the world.

Making lemonade out of lemons: What a pandemic taught us about teaching and learning in a project-based curriculum

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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