The collaborative project between the University of Arkansas Little Rock and Indiana University is using Web 2.0 and social networking methods to create an OnLine Chemistry Course (OLCC) in the area of cheminformatics. By leveraging distributed expertise, the project is enabling institutions to educate undergraduate chemists in a skill set that is rapidly increasing in importance to society. In addition to filling a subject gap within the curriculum, the project team is providing an exemplar for a teaching method that can be extended to other areas of undergraduate science education.
The artfully constructed and implemented OLCC is based on prior experience with less demanding offerings. It enables institutions of higher education to teach a class in the emerging area of effective use of computational and informatics techniques as part of the scientific discovery process. Beyond providing state-of-the-art undergraduate educational opportunities at the PIs' institutions, the project is making the cheminformatics materials available to institutions that wish to participate in the hybrid course wherein a facilitator at each participating institution is responsible for the local students grades and assessment. An additional intellectual merit of this sharing of experience is the latent faculty development that occurs as the non-expert facilitators gain experience in the content delivered by the distant experts. Simultaneously, the community is developing experience in and appreciation of new digital learning modalities that are increasingly comfortable to the new generation of 'free-agent learners'.
The OLCC is leading to the development of modules and digital Teaching and Learning Objects that are coded with meta data, retrievable via national and international archival mechanisms, and which can be repurposed and distributed into other curricular environments. The use of experts distributed beyond one campus or one country is educating current students by a new model that makes traditional boundaries of historical interest only. The on-line component of the hybrid course, with its many-lecturer-to-many-student components, coupled with nurtured student-to-student interactions will aid in the building of a diversified community. The OLCC design is developing modern instructional opportunities that extend beyond the traditional classroom and that industrial learners, non-traditional learners, and distance-learners can all utilize in ways that meet their unique needs.
