My Journey with Online Learning (Improvise.Adapt.Evolve)

Organic Chemistry is one of the most feared undergraduate science courses. A primary challenge is that most students do not learn about it until their first introductory organic chemistry course. On top of that, they have to learn how to analyze chemical structures, recognize functional groups, visualize two-dimensional structures in three dimensions, and assign stereocenters. As they absorb the basics of chemical structure, they begin to learn about chemical reactions. For each reaction, there is a logic associated with how and why the reactions take place. Accordingly, students will learn “arrow-pushing” mechanisms. Teaching these concepts and many more requires lots of drawings and even though this is not an art class, drawings have to be visually appealing to students. In this presentation, to make online teaching more engaging, experimentation with new online tools such as a digital pen and Microsoft White board will be presented along with some students’ reactions. Participants will also learn creating a class roster in Microsoft Teams, and the comparison of Teams with other video conferencing tools will also be provided. Considering teaching one of the most difficult course for science majors, my student survey mean improved from 4.08 to 4.18 (Fa19 to Fa20) with these newly adapted tools