The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic confronted higher education unexpectedly and with great urgency with an important change. In the face-to-face Physical Chemistry courses, we typically have a small group of students (10 to 12). This allows us a personalized tracing of how students learn, their difficulties and their individual progress. We wondered how to achieve similar outcomes in a virtual course without previous planning. In 2020 we had twice the number of students as usual. Many students thought that virtual courses would let them have more free time and they enrolled in more courses than usual. Later they came to the realization that the time necessary to learn was not shorter but sometimes longer, probably due to more individual and unsupervised work, and some abandoned courses.<br/>Our proposal was to invert roles. The students presented the topics. Their language is different to ours and is easier to understand by their peers. Their presentations let us know how they understood the subject, and to rescue the best parts and amend the incorrect concepts. They had to propose new problems, each covering two or three topics. Their work was evaluated in detail. We sent them our comments about their presentations in class, on the practical worksheets sent, and on the devised problems. The students acknowledged the detailed comments that let them appreciate their own progress. Assembling a course with very little planning, noticing advantages and disadvantages weekly to make appropriate needed changes, increased our workload significantly, and also taught us a lot.

COVID19 in 2020 forced emergency online courses in our universities: Were we ready to face this unprecedented challenge?

ACS Fall 2021

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