Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Are Textbooks Dispensable? On several occasions during the past year or so I have been asked, “Wouldn’t it be possible to base a chemistry course on computer- and Internet-based materials currently available through JCE?” My answer has always been a conservative one: there are still far too many lacunae in what is available from JCE (or any publisher, for that matter) to be able to base an entire course on it. However, every time the question is raised I ask myself whether my answer is really appropriate. There is a great deal of high-quality instructional material available from JCE Software and Only@JCE Online, and the quantity and quality are both growing rapidly. With our new, NSF-funded National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) project, much more will accumulate in a very short time. Maybe the answer to this question will soon be “yes”. “But wait a minute.” I hear you ask, “Aren’t you a textbook author? Wouldn’t you be cutting your own throat?” Well, maybe I would, but maybe it would be worth it. My primary goal is to help students to learn chemistry and to appreciate what fantastic value is contributed to our society by chemists and what we do. If that can be accomplished without a textbook, then by all means let’s dispense with the textbook. Thorough and thoughtful consideration is required before such a step could be taken, because many students depend heavily on textbooks to support their efforts to learn. Textbooks provide detailed development of topics, comprehensive coverage of content, high-quality graphics and photos, selected data conveniently tabulated, many exercises and problems to solve, and sundry other features useful to students. In some areas technology-based materials are sufficiently well developed that most or all of these features can be made available to students, but for a great many topics this is not true now and may not be true for some time to come. Unthinking adherence to the idea that textbooks are dispensable is not wise. Nevertheless, many advantages would accrue if we depended more heavily on media different from the printed page. Computation and visualization are major aspects of modern chemistry, and technology-based media are ideally suited to provide experience with both. Symbolic-algebra software such as Mathcad allows students to compute and discover without the drudgery of error-prone algebraic manipulations. Computer graphics can display structures of large molecules and other 3-D aspects of chemistry, allowing students to manipulate and learn from them. Today’s students have greater facility with computers than any before them—exceeding many of their instructors. Greater use of computers and the Internet as a medium of instruction would provide students with mathematical and visual ways to learn that are better attuned to what professional chemists do.
Technology-based …many advantages learning materials have another advantage: they would accrue if we are easy to update continually, incrementally, depended more heavily and communally. Electronic media can be on media different from changed at any time, with changes ranging the printed page from correction of typographical errors to incorporation of the latest information about a scientific discovery. Keeping material current is a big job, but if each member of the community of chemist-educators maintained a small section of the instructional oeuvre, this daunting task could be made possible and palatable. In addition, materials could be edited to address specific local needs, just as supplemental Lab Documentation in JCE laboratory experiments can be edited now. Because technology-based materials can be nonlinear, they are much more readily modularized. This allows much greater flexibility in curriculum and in accommodating learning styles, because modular materials can be used in different orders and can take different pedagogical approaches. The ability to hyperlink to background material that not all students need and to link modules in different ways affords the possibility of curricula designed to address a variety of students’ academic needs and learning styles. Because they are designed to be selected one at a time, modules might decrease the tendency to present all of the material simply because it is there. Modules also make it easier to do something my colleagues and I have done in first-year courses, namely to select a core that everyone will include but that leaves room for individual differences in both pedagogy and content. The Journal’s new NSDL project affords a matchless opportunity to do something about these and other issues related to technology-based learning. The JCE Digital Library seeks submissions of materials in all areas of chemistry and stands ready to serve as a central, organizing body to categorize submissions and to oversee editing and updating. If enough submissions are received, JCE Digital Library materials will soon fill many of the gaps in technology-based material currently available. Before long I expect that sufficient areas of chemistry will be represented so that teaching without a textbook will be feasible. What do you think? Want to give it a try? Send your ideas to
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 80 No. 4 April 2003 • Journal of Chemical Education
359
