CHEM 370M: Organic Chemistry Laboratory

This course offers an in-depth laboratory experience in organic chemistry for chemistry and biochemistry majors. Students are introduced to and become competent in modern laboratory techniques, including handling air-sensitive reagents and column chromatography. Students also get hands-on experience with advanced instrumentation.

The course is required for a major in Chemistry, Biochemistry, or Microbiology (CLS option). It is also required for a minor in Chemistry or Biochemistry.

CHEM 370M is our second-semester organic chemistry lab course for students majoring in chemistry and/or biochemistry. Its curriculum is designed to give students a research lab-type of experience. After meeting in-person twice in Week #1, the labcourse had to move online. The online lab then went primarily synchronous over Zoom and met twice a week for up to three hours each time. A few asynchronous activity days were interspersed throughout. The curriculum was comprised of four different multi-week experiments, and each experiment had all of the following components:

• videos

• virtual activities

• hands-on activities to complete at home

Each experiment comprised its own learning module on Blackboard, to which relevant material was added as needed.

All assignments from the original syllabus for the in-person lab were still utilized even after going online.

• Before video days, pre-lab notebook entries with calculations and a proposed procedure were due on Gradescope before the lab period. Students later submitted full notebook entries with thorough details of what took place and a summary of data analysis.

• Mandated completion of the virtual and hands-on activities was seamlessly integrated within original assignments from the syllabus such as lab notebooks, experiment report write-ups, and a weekly worksheet.

• All assignments were graded like any other semester and used essentially the same rubrics.

Informal feedback from the course's six students was sporadically integrated into a weekly worksheet assignment.

• All students said they would recommend the course to their peers.

• Students did not have a preference of learning activity - either video, virtual, or hands-on.

• Many students mentioned their appreciation for the videos and several were grateful for the associated notebook requirements.

• A couple students expressed their dislike of the final experiment due to the significant troubleshooting involved. However, this experiment was completely carried out at-home and having students troubleshoot for themselves was the entire point of the experiment.