Semester 1 Summary for Organic Chemistry

Just some end of semester thoughts on the use of Khan Academy for O-Chem from myself and the students. All students are seniors.

My thoughts:

1. The class is progressing at a slower pace than classes from the past few years.  There are a couple of reasons for this lag.  Firstly, students have more questions about the material and secondly, the students want to do ‘labs’ when they are in class and this is to be expected since it is a science class.
2. The depth and breadth of the material at the beginning of the course is very complete, however as one progresses thru the material, both of these dimensions shrink so the amount of supplement material needs to increase exponentially.
3. The students’ ability to become independent learners has grown and I suspect that a significant contributor is the use of these videos and holding the students accountable for the content in the videos.

Student thoughts (translated and summarized by me but approved by them):

1.   Students find the schedule of this class a definite plus since it affords them the ability to manage their time.  They have suggested that a class like this is important for all seniors to take since it is a transition to the college style of classes.

2.   The students have suggested that the videos are boring – they want animations, pictures, models other that the talking and writing on a board for 15-20 minutes.

3.   The students want a summary or key points more clearly delineated so that they know what to focus on – the videos lack the use of bold face, underlining or some other strategy for illustrating the major points.

4.   Students are thrilled with the ease of access to the material and have used it (ochem and other topics such as math) when they were off campus for sporting events or illness.  It really ‘helps in staying on top of the information’.

In all, the structure of the class is a real positive and while the videos have good content, they are insufficient for learning the material at the level that our students are capable of mastering.