With the lasting impacts of COVID-19 on higher education, student engagement during class time (in-person or virtual) has never been more important. In fact, surveys of chemistry instructors taken over the pandemic have repeatedly highlighted maintaining student engagement as their number one perceived issue.

Many instructors and faculty have succeeded in building a more active and engaging learning environment by flipping their classrooms. This practice typically involves pre-recorded content and/or reading material consumed by students outside of class so that they can work on assignments and problem solving during class time. Multiple studies, including those focused on chemistry courses^1,2,3, have now concluded that flipped classrooms can positively impact student performance.

In this workshop, you will learn and gain hands-on experience in how Professor Stephanie Dillon has flipped her General Chemistry course of 350+ students at Florida State University. In the first part of the workshop, you will learn best practices from Professor Dillon in terms of how she has architected her flipped course, including how she creates and delivers video content, and administers different types of activities/assessments throughout the term. In the second part, you will receive a guided and hands-on experience with the Chem101 platform that Professor Dillon utilizes to deliver in-class problem sets.

Chem101 is a next-generation active platform built specifically for chemistry courses such as General Chemistry, Introductory Chemistry, GOB Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry. The platform helps instructors easily incorporate active learning into their classrooms and can also keep students engaged outside of class with homework, extra practice, or quizzes that they can access anytime on their smartphones and other personal devices.

You will be provided with a personal device and get the opportunity to work with Chem101's scaffolded modules and intelligent feedback system that help students understand dimensional analysis, Lewis structures, nomenclature, chemical equations, equilibrium/ICE table problems, and more. We will also guide you through creating problem sets, incorporating OER into your assignments, and managing student performance. At the end of the workshop, you will take home your own instructor account with assignment templates to explore in the weeks and months to follow.

High school chemistry instructors are also welcomed to participate in the workshop.

1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fict.2017.00030/full
2. https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
3. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00717