Each year the Chemistry department teaches service courses in General, Organic, and Biochemistry to students from a multitude of departments. For many of these students, the five-course sequence (two general chemistry, two organic chemistry, and one biochemistry course) is either required for their major or their pre-health aspirations. As with many disciplines, while these courses approach the topic of chemistry from very different perspectives, they nonetheless rely heavily on a foundation of prerequisite skills that are taught in the previous courses.
Currently, students are expected to review and re-learn important prerequisite skills on their own, and the resources for doing that crucial review can oftentimes be difficult to locate. The goal of this project is to help students to Prepare with CARE (Chemistry Active-learning Resources for Educators) for their upper-level chemistry courses.
In the first stage of the CARE project, novel content (videos, worksheets, self-paced learning assessments) was developed, assessed, and deployed to support students who will be taking Organic chemistry at Boston University. In Summer 2020, we partnered with the Educational Resource Center (ERC) to deliver these modules as OrgoPrep 2.0. The completely new OrgoPrep 2.0 features the self-study materials developed by the CARE project, as well as live webinars over the summer.
The eventual goal is to have a fully-functioning suite of materials that will enable faculty and students to select and utilize carefully curated and targeted materials for getting ready for upper-division courses including organic chemistry (stage 1), biochemistry (stage 2), and related disciplines (biology and geology, stage 3).
