Organic chemistry can sizzle
Experienced
chemists know that chemistry is all around them. Helping students to
see the connections between real life and concepts of organic chemistry
is the driving force behind the development of a set of online resources
pioneered at UCLA.
It
is widely accepted that graduates in science, technology, engineering
and mathematics (STEM) fields are vital to the continued development of
the economy, healthcare, the environment, and countless elements of our
everyday lives. According to the Science and Engineering Indicators 2012,
roughly 1.75 million students enter colleges in the United States each
year with the intention of pursuing a STEM major. However, the attrition
statistics are striking. Nationwide, according to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST),
only 40% eventually graduate with a degree (or concentration) in one of
these fields. Therefore, it is essential that academics devote time and
resources to the development of innovative solutions to the growing
problems surrounding STEM education.
One
of the most daunting topics for college students is organic chemistry.
This topic, along with general chemistry, has been associated with the
departure of students from STEM fields. A report from the Ohio University Office of Institutional Research
shows that chemistry has one of the lowest first year retention rates.
What is it about organic chemistry that makes it so difficult for our
students? Several variables are responsible:
- Organic chemistry is a challenging subject. It requires students to think abstractly, while using analytical skills and problem solving techniques not found in other topics.
- Organic chemistry is not routinely taught at the high school level.
- The general perception of organic chemistry leaves much to be desired. Prior to attending college, many students hear rumours that organic chemistry is a ‘weed-out’ class requiring extensive memorization. This hampers student interest in the subject (Attrition in STEM Fields at a Liberal Arts College: The Importance of Grades and Pre-Collegiate Preferences Cornell Univ. ILR School; 2010).
- Chemistry has largely been taught in the same way for decades, with courses passed down from generation to generation. Experienced professors may be reluctant to change, especially if they are concurrently running a research group that requires external funding.
- Students seldom have an understanding of the important role that organic chemistry plays in society. Understanding and improving this situation is an important goal for all of those involved in the practice of teaching chemistry (Improving Performance in First Year Chemistry Thesis, Texas Tech Univ.; 2005).
Rachael Tremlett/Macmillan Publishers Limited/War posters/Alamy Stock Photo
We
have long thought that students should be taught to enjoy organic
chemistry, or perhaps even be inspired to love it. With this in mind,
and with the key goal of helping students succeed in their organic
chemistry coursework and persevering in STEM subjects in general, we
have developed a series of online learning modules we affectionately
call BACON. BACON stands for Biology and Chemistry Online Notes and is
intended to arm students with organic chemistry knowledge, reinforce key
concepts, and illustrate the relevance of organic chemistry in medicine
and other aspects of our everyday lives, including popular culture.
Herein, we describe the creation and content of BACON, its expansion to
engage thousands of students worldwide, and its impact and future
prospects.
The BACON
project was first launched at UCLA in early 2014. At the time, one of us
(N.K.G.) was instructing a sophomore-level organic chemistry course and
was asked by a life sciences colleague: “How much time is spent making
connections to medicine and biology?” Although links between these
topics were considered highly valuable, the intense course curriculum
and the time constraints of the 10-week quarter system rendered it
challenging to include such material in the usual lectures. We reasoned
that providing these materials as an online supplemental resource would
solve this issue as well as providing other advantages (Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning Harvard Univ. Press; 2014 and Science 304,
521–522; 2004). For example, the online environment provides a vehicle
for making extensive connections between organic chemistry and popular
culture (such as movies, TV shows and sports) as a means to engage the
‘YouTube generation’ of students and help them recognize that chemistry
is all around them. Additionally, it allows instructors with established
lecture-type curricula to readily incorporate BACON as a supplement to
their teaching. This type of blended curriculum (Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies
US Department of Education; 2010) featuring conventional teaching and
BACON modules was considered ideal to enrich the student learning
experience.
“The online environment provides a vehicle to make extensive connections between organic chemistry and popular culture”
The
creation of BACON has involved a spirit of collaboration, layered with
mentoring and learning opportunities. Initially, it involved a close
collaboration between a graduate teaching assistant at the time (T.K.S.)
and the principal investigator (N.K.G.). Over the course of several
lively meetings, we conceived the necessary tutorial topics and key
concepts, as well as the connection between organic chemistry and
medicine, everyday life and popular culture. The student involved
(T.K.S.) had countless opportunities to be creative, hone written and
presentation skills, and learn many important aspects of pedagogy.
Rachael Tremlett/Macmillan Publishers Limited
Ultimately,
ten interactive BACON tutorials, each 15–20 minutes long, showcasing
current events, visual aids and video clips were created. For example,
one tutorial focuses on radical reactions, a popular topic in most
organic chemistry courses. The BACON tutorial provides a ‘refresher’ on
the key concepts of radical chemistry before giving real-life examples,
such as how oxygen radicals can react with cells and DNA, and are thus
associated with cancer, Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. The
tutorial goes on to explain that antioxidants can help to prevent the
damage in our bodies and shows which foods and vitamins contain
antioxidants. It even asks students questions about how antioxidants
protect our bodies when they react with oxygen radicals. Finally, the
tutorial further engages students by making connections to popular
culture by, for example, discussing Muhammad Ali's battle with Parkinson
disease and the progression of Alzheimer disease seen in the hit film
‘Still Alice’. The corresponding text contains hyperlinks to other
informative websites, primary research articles and videos throughout
the tutorial, so that students can learn more, if they desire.
Here,
two additional examples of BACON content are depicted. One connects the
concept of electrophilicity to the remarkable antibiotic penicillin and
its use on the battlefield in the Second World War. The other
demonstrates that enantiomers of a given compound may interact
differently with our taste receptors, as is the case for the two
enantiomers of the popular artificial sweetener aspartame. Other BACON
tutorials feature revolutionary organic materials being used to
construct sports arenas, the chemistry behind transition lenses, and
numerous examples of how organic chemistry is used to prepare the vast
majority of life-saving medicines available to humans.
BACON
was piloted on 375 UCLA undergraduates in 2014. Their post-course
evaluations — completed with a response rate of >95% — demonstrated
that the union of typical course content to real-world applications and
popular culture provided a highly effective way to engage students.
BACON was viewed as being ‘fun and informative’ (4.3/5.0 rating), and
helpful in letting students see connections between chemistry and
biology not covered in the lectures (4.4/5.0 rating). The majority of
students indicated that BACON helped to increase their general
appreciation of organic chemistry (4.3/5.0 rating) and that it should be
used in future course offerings (4.6/5.0 rating). Lastly, students
suggested that resources analogous to BACON would be welcomed in other
STEM courses (4.4/5.0 rating).
Encouraged
by these reviews, we devoted considerable effort to refining the BACON
content the following year and subsequently obtaining additional
assessment data beyond satisfaction-based surveys. Further mentoring
opportunities were created by the involvement of a second graduate
student and three undergraduates, the latter of whom were able to
receive UCLA course credit for working on educational resources. The
BACON team met weekly as a group and in smaller groups in which the
students worked collaboratively through a vertical mentoring system.
Ultimately, we were able to refine the prior tutorials, create
additional tutorials, introduce several sections on modern organic
chemistry research, and introduce quizzes for students to take before
and after completing the tutorials. The new and improved version of
BACON was used by 1,500 students in 2015 by five classes. Although
student quiz scores prior to completing BACON tutorials averaged around
50%, these rose to 90% after the completion of the BACON tutorials. This
data in combination with the satisfaction-based surveys encouraged us
to further expand the project.
With the goal of making the BACON tutorials widely available, we developed a new website: learnbacon.com.
The website allows for multiple ‘BACON courses’, which are custom
compilations of specific BACON tutorials chosen by professors, to be run
simultaneously. In this way, professors can choose the tutorials that
they deem to be appropriate for students based on their own course
content. The tutorials that are currently available are: functional
groups and reactivity fundamentals; stereochemistry and chirality;
radical reactions; substitution reactions; elimination reactions;
alcohols and epoxides; alkenes and alkynes; Diels–Alder and pericyclic
reactions; aromaticity and electrophilic aromatic substitution; enols
and enolates; aldehydes and ketones; carboxylic acids and derivatives;
polymers; cross-coupling reactions; mass spectrometry; and NMR and IR
spectroscopy.
Blended online and face-to-face courses often struggle with faculty resistance to using new technologies, (Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning
Jossey–Bass; 2011); therefore, we made efforts to design the BACON
interface with features to simplify the experience for both students and
faculty. For example, the platform e-mails reminders to students when
tutorials become available (and when coursework is due), as well as
providing an array of easy-to-use grading functions. How to make use of
the BACON grades (for example, as a requirement or for optional extra
credit) is left to the professor.
Learnbacon.com
was launched in early 2016 and adopted by several schools as part of
our initial expansion efforts. This phase proceeded smoothly, so we have
now increased the availability of BACON to instructors and students
worldwide. So far, the organic chemistry BACON tutorials have been used
as supplemental materials for more than 150 courses, spanning at least
75 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe,
Mexico, Japan, India and the Middle East. Nearly 15,000 students have
been educated by BACON tutorials to date.
The
benefits of the BACON project on STEM education can be seen from
several viewpoints. The project has given numerous undergraduate and
graduate students the unique opportunity to be involved in the creation
of educational content. Writing instructive content of any variety is
challenging, but combining this with connections to modern research and
popular culture adds significant complexity to the process. What is
perhaps most striking about BACON is the sheer number of STEM students
that have been reached and can be positively affected in the future. We
expect that it will enliven organic chemistry for tens of thousands of
students in the upcoming years. We are optimistic that these efforts
will ultimately help to shatter the negative perception of organic
chemistry amongst students, and perhaps even the general population,
over time, while also providing the impetus for other academics to
develop BACON-like resources for other STEM fields.
Acknowledgements
The
authors thank J. Kim, V. Kassar, C. Lin, K. Patel, A. Mally, L. Pham,
J. Randhawa, J. Dander, J. Barber and the Chem 14D students for their
efforts to improve the BACON project. The authors also thank J. Dander,
T. Boit and L. Morrill from UCLA for helpful discussions. D. Caspi
(Element TwentySix) is gratefully acknowledged for insightful
discussions and web development associated with learnbacon.com.
Author information
Affiliations
Tejas K. Shah and Neil K. Garg are in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
