Teaching Cheminformatics through a Collaborative Intercollegiate Online Chemistry Course (OLCC)

Abstract

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.

Figure 1

Instructional approaches of Cheminformatics OLCC.

Figure 2

Course content map for the Cheminformatics OLCCs, offered in Fall 2015, Spring 2017, and Fall 2019. The triangles, rectangles, and ovals indicate the topics covered in one, two, and three Cheminformatics OLCCs, respectively. The colors of the shapes represent the year(s) in which the corresponding topics were covered (see the Venn Diagram at the top-left).

Figure 3

Student perceptions of OLCC in relation to the specific aspects of the course.