Graduate Studies Online Course Services Mini-grant

Chem 255 Topics in Chemistry Education

Course Description

Topics in Chemistry Education (CHEM 255) is a graduate level course. The enrollment capacity is 40. This course is ideal for any graduate student interested in teaching chemistry at the college level, either as a Teaching Assitant at Sacramento State or Instructor in your future career. The focus of the course is on teaching college chemistry classes, and doing it well. The best practices in a number of topics related to course design and course delivery will be examined, so that by the end of the course, students will feel like they are well-equipped to build and deliver a college-level chemistry class all by themeselves.

Motivation for Graduate Studies Online Course Services Mini-grant Participation

Many students in the chemistry graduate program want to teach at community colleges or four-year universities after graduation. However, there are no graduate courses to prepare them for their future teaching career in the past ten years. Moreover, the most graduate students have jobs outside of school, which makes it hard for them to come to campus for face-to-face classes.

The Chem 255 course will fulfill graduate students' need for a specialized chemical education course, as there were no such graduate courses offered in the past ten years.

Therefore, the participation of the program can help me to develop a high-quality course for hybrid or online teaching, which is highly accessible to all students and can accommodate students who have difficulty attending in-person classes and can better prepare the graduate students for various teaching environments. Moreover, this course can be open to other STEM graduate students for college teaching.

Alignment or Engagement Changes Addressed in Course

This Chem 255 is a new course I have developed supported by the mini-grant.

Designed the home page to include navigation video and introduce the structure of the course. This meets SRS 1.1 and 1.2 for clear overall design and an introduction to the structure and purpose of the course.
Created overview and to-do pages for each module with active hyperlinks each pages. This is to make module-level objectives and alignment of course-level objectives clearer (SRS 2.1 and 2.2). The active links can improve course navigation (SRS 8.1).
Created sub-moduel pages for each module. This can improve course navigation (SRS 8.1) and provide a variety of instructional materials and assignments for each module (SRS 3.1).

Evidence of Redesign

Examples of Redesign
Homepage with naviagation videos, purpose of the course, and introduction of the course structure.	Module Overview Page is created to include the module and course level objectives and a to do list with active links.	Example Sub-Module Page showing the directions of an assignment in a module.

Plan for Pathway toward QM Certification

Due to budget issues, the department of chemistry has postphoned my offer of this course. I plan to work on QM Certification after the course is offered and the Canvas course is optimized.

Faculty Bio
	Yujuan Liu holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry Education and a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Dr. Liu teaches general chemistry lectures and general and organic chemistry laboratory courses. Her research interests include (1) developing and evaluating green chemistry experiments for undergraduate laboratory curriculum and (2) investigating student affect (e.g. motivation, self-efficacy, and goals) based on theory-based instruments for interventions to improve student achievement and retention. She is an active member of American Chemical Society and has published many conference papers and journal articles on development, implementation, and evaluation of laboratory projects and evidence-based instructional practices.