Comprehensive Physical Chemistry Learning Based on Blended Learning: A New Laboratory Course

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increasing amount of research on redesigning educational models. This paper describes the contents of a new laboratory course on physical chemistry based on blended learning, designed for third-year students in the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Chuo University. We provided students with digest video materials for flipped learning, a cloud computing environment, and video conferencing tools. These materials enhanced the course contents to facilitate effective education during the pandemic. The results of a questionnaire survey showed that students were delighted with the new course, which comprehensively included experiments, computation, and data science.

The new course content has been restructured to conform to well-known textbooks. It includes the concepts of phase equilibria, buffers, titration, intermolecular interactions, spectroscopy, solutions, coordination chemistry, and kinetics. These contents correspond to our textbook chapters “Condensed Systems Study by Chemical Thermodynamics and Data Science”, and “Single Molecules Study by Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemistry”. Traditionally, each of the contents have been taught almost independently with fewer relationships. However, in our proposed 12-module system, nine experimental contents are connected by three modern computer-related contents, as shown in the figure.

Reference

Nahoko Kuroki and Hirotoshi Mori, Journal of Chemical Education, 2021, 98 (12), 3864-3870, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00666