In accordance with the Chemistry Department's goal of providing a premier education in chemistry for its undergraduates by the year 2000, the department is equipping the Chemistry Interactive Learning Center (CILC) with a network of 16 Pentium-based computers and 1 SGI Indigo2 Workstation. This center is an upper-division teaching facility that permits learning to take place with integrated flexible instructional formats and is essential for the implementation of curricular changes that enhance student training for the real-world workplace. The curriculum changes target the use of cutting-edge computer and multimedia technologies to integrate concept learning with the development of communication, management, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in the following chemistry major courses: Basic Inorganic Chemistry, Quantitative Analysis, Physical Chemistry, Instrumental Analysis, and Polymer Chemistry. The CILC can be a crucial segment of the learning infrastructure available to chemistry students. The CILC is to serve as a model for other university chemistry departments considering the use of multimedia technologies to integrate concept learning with skills development in integrated course/laboratory instruction.
