Exercise environment Organic Chemistry I
Abstract
The pedagogical structure at ETH differs from all textbooks and existing approaches in e-learning. Although already piloted in the framework of the Organic Chemistry I lecture course for degree programmes Biol./Pharm./BWS, the environment will now be made accessible to all ETH students of organic chemistry (3 parallel lecture courses with ca. 700 students).Therefore we are planning to convert it to a metacourse with tiered levels of exercise difficulty and exercises grouped by theme. Each lecturer may put together a suitable model for his/her course. The emphasis will be online exercises and self-checking (tests on each theme, similar to first-year exams), plus a discussion forum with interactive student-faculty question-and-answer sessions.
Subject-specific difficulties, especially in the application of chemical structure formulas, must be ovecome using suitable software modules/plugins.
Compared to the pilot, the scope aimed at is an extension of the exercise questions by a factor of 2-10, depending on the theme.