An account of strategies and innovations for teaching chemistry during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to an abrupt suspension of face‐to‐face teaching activities in higher education institutions across the globe. The instructors and faculty at most institutions have had to adapt, invent, and implement adjustments quickly to adopt an online learning environment. This has been an extraordinarily challenging time for both students and instructors, particularly as many were not aware of the affordances and weaknesses of the online learning environment before it was uptaken. Particularly for chemistry and related disciplines, this change in delivery mode is even more disruptive in courses that have laboratory components due to loss of access to laboratories. As a teaching community, it was our responsibility to respond quickly and effectively to students' learning needs during this unprecedented global crisis. In our course, we provided succinct pre‐recorded lecture‐videos by topic rather than live‐streaming of lectures. The recordings were made available to students a minimum of 24 h before the scheduled lecture time. Students were then provided opportunities to attend live tutorial sessions (held on Zoom and live Q&A feature on Piazza) if they had any questions that they wanted to ask the lecturer directly. We believe that the asynchronous sessions were more equitable than synchronous ones. This meant that students with difficult and challenging home/learning environments (i.e., disruptions at home, work/family schedules, poor internet, limited access to devices, etc.) were minimally disadvantaged. The approach worked well in general for teaching chemistry to pharmacy students and we believe that it can be adopted for other subjects.

At present, the COVID‐19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruptions in teaching across the globe. The requirements of physical distance and other restrictions prompted higher education institutions to adopt remote teaching practices. ¹ , ² The most challenging aspect of this was the speed of the shift from face‐to‐face lectures to completely remote or/and online pedagogies. The transition to this approach and format with minimal impact on the students' learning required rapid adoption and mastery of technology that many had not used before. ³ As we were into the fourth week of a semester, at our institution, we were provided with a teaching‐free week to adapt, generate resources and prepare for this new way of delivering the course. The institute emphasized that in our approach, we were to adopt methods that focussed on the concepts of simplicity (focusing on the simplest possible way to deliver our course), flexibility (that we did not need to attempt to replicate your face‐to‐face teaching, but in an online form—instead we were encouraged to focus on delivering our main principles and in the most straightforward manner) and empathy (remembering that this was an extraordinary situation and that we should all prioritize treating our students with kindness and understanding, particularly given the difficult circumstances that many of the students were going through).

We were halfway through teaching a pharmaceutical chemistry module to pharmacy students with a course enrolment of 100. The module covers key concepts for the understanding of drugs as chemical substances, the basis of drug action and the principles of pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics and toxicology. For remote learning and teaching, we pre‐recorded lectures using Zoom, and recordings were edited, ensuring the recordings were understandable and clear. We delivered the same topics/concepts in the same sequence/order designed for face‐to‐face delivery, but rather than adhering to a 1‐h long lecture, the recordings were split into smaller videos. Each video was focused on specific learning outcome(s) or concept, in alignment with assessment activities by following the 'backward design model'. ⁴ , ⁵ This made the most pedagogical sense for the students and allowed them to engage with the material to a greater degree than what they would with a lengthy recording where concentration is more likely to lapse. The recordings were provided to the students in advance (a minimum of 24 h before their scheduled lecture time) to give them ample opportunity to learn and understand the material. Students were then encouraged to attend live tutorial sessions (held on Zoom), taking place during what would have been the lecture time, if they had any questions that they wanted to ask the lecturer directly.

The live tutorials did have low attendance of about 20–25%. This may be due to a number of reasons. These sessions were only for asking any questions that arose from the recorded material and either students did not feel the need to ask questions or they may not have had access to a device at that specific time. Students were also given the option to send questions before the session, via email, to provide equal opportunity to those that were unable to attend the live session.

Laboratory, practical work was also an important part of this course (and other experimental science courses). To adjust to a remote learning mode, but still provide students exposure to concepts that they would have encountered in the laboratory section of the course, we also adopted new strategies. Students were provided videos of relevant techniques and experiments that they would have performed in the lab, as well as example output that they would have generated (i.e., data/spectra). Students were then able to analyze and interpret the data and write up a lab report based on the provided resources. Although this approach did not provide them hands‐on experience, their critical thinking and problem‐solving ability was challenged and they were able to be introduced to teachings that they would have learned in the laboratory. Students' learning was assessed using the online assessment activities appropriate for a 'take‐home or open‐book' format, but covering the same learning outcomes. The primary focus was to use activities and questions that assessed students' understanding rather than recalling facts.

In summary, providing shorter, learning outcome‐focused pre‐recorded videos rather than live‐streaming long lectures worked very well and had several benefits, particularly regarding equitability for students. Students were able to review and re‐watch the recordings as many times as they wished and at a time that suited them the most—this meant that students with difficult and challenging environments (i.e., disruptions at home, poor internet, limited access to devices, etc.) were minimally disadvantaged. We believe that our approach in providing short, learning outcome‐based pre‐recorded videos can be adopted for other courses and subjects in this new era of worldwide remote learning.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Pilkington LI, Hanif M. An account of strategies and innovations for teaching chemistry during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Biochem Mol Biol Educ. 2021;49:320–322. 10.1002/bmb.21511