Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series

The world wide web has been in existence for just over twenty-five years, but already its potential for impacting education appears to be infinite. Online platforms provide increasingly sophisticated tools for the mass dissemination of knowledge and sharing of ideas. These platforms can currently be accessed by the more than half of the people on Earth who have access to the internet in 2017, and the infrastructure for the internet continues to expand rapidly into developing global locations. Today, online learning is an important current topic for contemporary educators in diverse fields. The chapters in this book address these topics specifically for the field of chemistry, giving overviews of existing work as well as "snapshot in time" examples of the work being conducted in this area. The purpose of the book is to examine the relevant successes, challenges, research findings, and practical examples in online approaches to chemistry education.

Pia Sörensen is Senior Preceptor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Materials at the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her research interests range from science and engineering education- with an emphasis on online education and creative ways of teaching science and engineering in a liberal arts setting- to the science of food and the chemical and microbial processes of food fermentations. Prior to joining the faculty of the Harvard Paulson School in 2011, Sörensen received a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from Harvard University. Dorian Canelas has been teaching general and organic chemistry for over a dozen years. She has received numerous research, education, and leadership awards, including most recently the 2017 David and Janet Vaughan Brooks Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Her academic interests include the development of soft or transferable skills through science coursework, the study of best practices for science-career retention for students from historically marginalized groups, and the evolving status of online learning in higher education. Prior to joining the faculty of Duke University's Department of Chemistry in 2009, she taught chemistry courses at North Carolina State University and held research-intensive positions for several years in both academia and industry. Canelas received a B.S. In Chemistry from Northeastern University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.