Challenges in Creating Online Exercises and Exams in Organic Chemistry

Authors

  • Bernhard Jaun Laboratorium für Organische Chemie ETH Zurich Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 3 CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland
  • Carlo Thilgen Laboratorium für Organische Chemie ETH Zurich Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 3 CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland. thilgen@org.chem.ethz.ch

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2533/chimia.2018.48

Keywords:

E-learning, Moodle, Online exercises and exams, Smiles generator, Structural formula editor

Abstract

e-Learning has become increasingly important in chemical education and online exams can be an attractive alternative to traditional exams written on paper, particularly in classes with a large number of students. Ten years ago, we began to set up an e-course complementing our lecture courses Organic Chemistry I and II within the open-source e-learning environment Moodle. In this article, we retrace a number of decisions we took over time, thereby illustrating the challenges one faces when creating online exercises and exams in (organic) chemistry. Special emphasis is put on the development of MOSFECCS (MOlecular Structural Formula Editor and Calculator of Canonical SMILES), our new editor for drawing structural formulae and converting them to alphanumeric SMILES codes that can be submitted as answers to e-problems. Convinced that the possibility for structure input is essential to set up sensible chemistry quizzes and exams, and realising that existing tools present major flaws in an educational context, we decided to embark on the implementation of MOSFECCS which takes into account a number of didactic aspects.

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Published

2018-02-01

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Scientific Articles