From the Ground Up: The Development, Implementation, and Assessment of a Comprehensive Curriculum Redesign for Organic Chemistry

Comprehensive redesign and implementation of an organic chemistry curriculum is a complex and multi-faceted undertaking. All revisions must sustain academic rigor and support continuing modifications. Unfortunately, external metrics designed to measure the success of comprehensive curriculum changes are uncommon or only marginally helpful. Our unique metrics developed in conjunction with curriculum redesign will be discussed. In addition to pedagogical changes incorporated into classroom presentations, laboratory exercises must concomitantly be developed that reinforce a broad spectrum of chemical principles and concepts. New laboratory experiments should incorporate modern analytical instrumentation and possess the capacity to obtain similar but different experimental outcomes. Our multi-outcome experiments represent a unique solution to these challenges. Furthermore, experiment development and implementation are extremely useful in rehearsing and reinforcing methodologies and techniques essential to undergraduate and graduate education. The search for novel experiments using modern analytical instrumentation often leads to exciting discoveries that have applications that extend beyond the classroom. Some of our newly patented discoveries will be presented.