General Chemistry education in a pandemic

Abstract

With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision to close post-secondary schools to in-person teaching, an opportunity was presented to examine the challenges, benefits, and ability to pivot to an online teaching environment. Given the tight deadline to present Chemistry 121 (General Chemistry and Laboratory I) for the first time as an online course, during the Summer 2020 semester at Simon Fraser University, a team-based approach to develop and run the course was used. The approaches adopted and new course components utilized are analyzed from the students’ perspective to gauge their efficiency. The insight gained from converting this large enrollment course will be offered.