The Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL) has developed a broad range of resources and services involving Web-delivered chemistry instructional materials for teachers and students from K-16 educational levels. This project is identifying areas where the ChemEd DL lacks materials, is adding new resources in those areas, is amalgamating individual resources into larger units that teachers and students can easily use, and is developing pedagogic documentation of best educational practices in using its resources. These goals are being achieved by mobilizing participants in already-planned ChemEd DL workshops to evaluate resources, add new ones, combine resources into larger units, and describe successful pedagogy based on those units. This process is being facilitated by the NSDL Pedagogic Service, which is providing a clearinghouse for descriptions of exemplary uses of online instructional materials. The project is also collaborating with the STEM Exchange project of the NSDL Resource Center. The project is using social networks as a means of dissemination of the pedagogic information and resources it develops. This is enhancing both discoverability and usefulness of ChemEd DL materials for teachers and hence is bringing to many more students excellent online learning materials. By improving chemistry education, the project is increasing the number and skills of the nation's scientific and technical workforce.
was designed to induce greater usage of the many online chemistry education resources collected by the Chemical Educatin Digital Library. The ChemEd DL is a website that contains a variety of resources: an interactive periodic table, 3-D molecular structure models, a wiki containing chemistry textbooks, a course management system for constructing chemistry courses, a collection keyed to the high school chemistry curriculum and to national standards, and a tool for creating online textbooks based on the other available resources. The ChemEd DL home page is at www.chemeddl.org/ and is shown in Figure 1. The project publicized the ChemEd DL through workshops for chemistry and science teachers, presentations at conferences attended by science teachers, and booths in the exposition areas at such meetings. There were 21 workshops attended by approximately 300 teachers, 14 conference presentations attended by about 500 persons, and four booth displays viewed by about 350 persons. In addition publicity was provided through websites and publications widely read by teachers. A major, week-long workshop was held in the summer of 2011 with 15 teachers in attendance from two-year and four-year colleges. These teachers were trained in use of the ChemEd DL resources and also in chemical education research techniques that could be used to measure the success of their use of the ChemEd DL with students. A year later 13 of the 15 workshop participants reported on their successful use and evaluation of ChemEd DL resources at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education at Penn State University. The pedagogical knowledge developed by these teachers is archived in the SERC Pedagogic Service at Carleton College. Their lessons that include the ChemEd DL resources are available to the public through the ChemEd Courses (course management) section of the ChemEd DL (see Figure 2). ChemEd Courses contains many other chemistry instructional modules, and only part of the list is shown in the figure. The ChemEd DL resource that was most popular with chemistry teachers was found to be Models 360. It allows display of molecular structures, showing the locations of atoms in more than 800 molecules. Each molecule can be rotated with the computer mouse to show different properties of its structure. This resource was used by more than half the teachers who created new instructional materials. A molecular display is shown in Figure 3. This project was very successful in encouraging teachers to use the ChemEd DL resources and in demonstrating the value of those resources for chemistry teaching.
