Jennifer L. Muzyka

While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)’s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.

The transition to a remote teaching and learning environment was quick and painful at times, and yet it was a learning experience for everyone. The chemists at Centre College utilized new (to them) technology to reimagine the typical face to face interactions with students and colleagues. From Slack to Pear Deck to Zoom classrooms, the faculty and students engaged with a variety of platforms to continue to learn remotely despite the challenges of the global pandemic. The faculty learned the value of utilizing different types of technology, and the students learned some important skills and content.