Creation of a Medicinal Chemistry MOOC as a Teaching Tool for Both

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Chapter 7

Creation of a Medicinal Chemistry MOOC as a Teaching Tool for Both Online and Residential Students Erland P. Stevens* Department of Chemistry, Davidson College, Box 7120, Davidson, North Carolina 28035, United States *E-mail: [email protected]

A massive open online course on the topic of medicinal chemistry has been designed and launched on the edX platform. Major topics include drug targets, pharmacokinetics, metabolism, lead discovery, and lead optimization. The MOOC has attracted over 25,000 registered students through two iterations. Nearly 2,400 students have completed the course, and almost 1,200 have passed with an overall score of at least 70%. The MOOC content has also been used to teach the theory of medicinal chemistry in a residential course so that in-class time can focus on discussions of primary literature articles. Residential students have been involved in both the creation of content for the MOOC and management of the online course.

Introduction New technologies and different teaching methods in the chemistry classroom are a means for addressing some of chemistry’s perceived problems, including student access and retention. Examples of new technologies include the use of tablet computers in the classroom (1–4), online homework (3, 5), and video recorded instruction for review outside of class (3, 6–8). Teaching techniques that contrast with traditional, lecture-based approaches include classroom flipping (4, 9–11) and inquiry-based methods (12, 13). While each teaching approach and tool has strengths and weaknesses, most instructors agree that new methods and tools, if used appropriately, can improve learning outcomes in the classroom.

© 2016 American Chemical Society Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


One very recently developed instructional method is the massive open online course, or MOOC (14). MOOCs are classes taught over the internet with no enrollment restrictions. Two of the most well-known MOOC platforms are edX (15) and Coursera (16). Most MOOCs are free to the public with optional payment for certification of completion. MOOCs are generally lecture-based courses and, in this regard, MOOCs are not pedagogically distinctive. MOOCs, however, greatly increase student access to instructional content, can allow students to work at their own pace, and even facilitate peer-peer interactions through online discussion boards. In these areas, MOOCs are innovative and accommodating for students. Although MOOCs are normally designed as stand-alone courses, MOOCs can be used to deliver content in a residential class. Students learn the theory as they progress through the MOOC material outside of the classroom so that valuable face-to-face time in class with the instructor can be used for case studies from the primary literature or other interactive discussions of the course topics. In this usage, the MOOC essentially serves as an online textbook and is a tool for flipping the classroom. Over the past two years, I have worked with a team of campus professionals at Davidson College to make and refine a MOOC on the topic of medicinal chemistry. The MOOC has been used both as a stand-alone online course and blended with a residential class.

Results and Discussion Initial Design of a MOOC In May 2013 Dr. Carol Quillen, Davidson College’s president, signed an agreement making Davidson a charter member of the edX consortium (17). Davidson committed to produce four MOOCs over a two-year period. All courses would be administered under the DavidsonX name to prevent confusion with residential Davidson courses. The four courses were identified by late August. The first approved DavidsonX course was a class on medicinal chemistry with a target release of March 2014. Most early MOOCs at institutions such as MIT and Harvard were direct transitions of one-semester residential courses to an online format. The courses included multiple, hour-long lectures in each week (18). Following this example, the initial proposal for the medicinal chemistry MOOC described essentially an online version of Davidson’s residential course, CHE 374 Medicinal Chemistry. Two concerns were raised. First, the six-month course deadline limited the total amount of video that could be produced. Second, internal data from edX indicated that shorter video lectures improved student engagement. As a result of these concerns, the new medicinal chemistry MOOC was reduced to just seven weeks with each video lecture lasting no more than 10 minutes. With a seven-week length, the MOOC was necessarily a very different course from the residential version. The amount of total lecture time in the residential course is approximately 35 hours, but the MOOC was planned to have only 7 hours of video content. The MOOC is more than just video content. The MOOC also includes web-based readings and associated problem sets. Some of 76 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

the material that is normally presented through lectures in the residential course can be adequately presented in a reading assignment. Regardless of the planned supplementary MOOC content, the MOOC could not include all the material of the residential course. The MOOC was therefore pared down to the bare essentials of medicinal chemistry. The final topic selections and outline were guided by the concepts most commonly encountered in drug discovery lectures at ACS meetings as well as necessary background information (Table 1).


Table 1. Medicinal Chemistry MOOC Chapters with Topics Chapter

Selected topics

Pre-regulatory medicine

Natural products, early synthetic drugs

Drug discovery overview

Regulatory approval, intellectual property

Protein structure

Levels of structure, x-ray crystallography

Enzymes

Enzyme kinetics, inhibition

Receptors

Response curves, occupancy theory

Blood and drug transport

Drug absorption and elimination

Pharmacokinetics

Clearance, distribution, compartment models

Metabolism

Phase I and II reactions, drug interactions

Drug binding and structure

Intermolecular forces, drug space, libraries

Lead discovery

Screening, fragments, hit prioritization

Lead optimization

Functional group replacements, isosteres

Two large topics in the residential course that were cut from the MOOC are quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) and pharmaceutical synthesis. QSAR is directly related to drug discovery, but it is rarely used today by practicing medicinal chemists. Pharmaceutical synthesis is relevant to the drug industry as a whole but less central to drug discovery. Removing these two main topics accomplished two goals. First, the remaining content fit into a seven-week MOOC. Second, the organic prerequisites of the MOOC could be relaxed somewhat. Reducing the required organic experience made the MOOC accessible to a broader online audience. Course Production Production began as soon as the course structure had been determined. Creating a MOOC is a team effort, and the DavidsonX team consisted of seven members: Allison Dulin as the team leader, Erland Stevens as the instructor, Kristen Eshleman and Paul Brantley as instructional technologists, Robert McSwain as the videographer, Olivia Booker for graphic design, and Sara Swanson for clearing copyright material. Production formally started in mid-September and, aside from holidays and college breaks, ran continuously 77 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


through the start of February. In total, the team produced approximately 50 instructional units. Each unit opened with a 6-10 minute video lecture on a selected topic and continued with related readings. Most units included homework questions to measure student understanding. Each week of the MOOC contained between 6 and 8 units. Tests were placed at the end of weeks 2, 4, and 7. At the peak of production, the team was able to create a week of MOOC content in two weeks of real time. Course production was demanding and timeintensive. The videographer, graphic designer, and, to a lesser extent, the instructor handled video production. The instructor designed and created almost all the course HTML content. During the five-month production window, creation of the MOOC required approximately 30 h/wk of the instructor’s time. Most of the work, especially the HTML content, can be performed at any time, but the video production typically required coordination among multiple team members and had to be scheduled during the traditional workday. As it was being created, new content was released to a group of 20 beta-testers, mostly Davidson alumni and students with interests in chemistry and medicine. The beta-testers provided valuable feedback on lectures, readings, and assessments and helped locate typographical errors. Weekly meetings of the course team covered feedback from the beta-testers, progress on course development, and communications with edX. The course was nearly complete within a month of the March release date. The month of February was regardless very busy with matters such as promotion of the MOOC, video transcript generation and editing, finalization of course policies, and setting internal deadlines within the edX platform.

March 2014 MOOC Launch The MOOC launched in early March with an enrollment of 11,243 (19). Students continued to join the course during and even up to a year after the course was complete. The course ultimately attracted 15,991 registrants who had access to all the class materials. Students enrolled for the course in three different categories: audit, honor code, and ID verified. Both audit and honor code categories were free. ID verified students paid $50 for identity confirmation during login. Most of the ID verified students selected to pay for the course so that they might use the course as an education credential in their workplace. A total of 201 students paid for ID verification. The MOOC attracted an international audience with students from over 140 different countries (Tables 2 and 3). The geographic information is not fully complete because many students (n = 5,267) did not indicate a country of origin. The course ran through the middle of May. As with most MOOCs (20), the rate of attrition was high (Figure 1). Only approximately half of the registered students viewed any part of the course material. Furthermore, less than half of the students who viewed the introductory materials returned for week 2 of the course. Of the students who returned after the first test at the end of week 2 (n = 2,427), around 67% remained active in the final week (n = 1,602). 78 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

Table 2. Enrollment by Continent Continent

Students 372


Africa Asia

2,450

Europe

2,415

Oceania

258

South America

564

North America

4,710

Table 3. High Enrollment Nations Nation

Students 3,972

United States India

900

United Kingdom

507

Canada

402

Germany

286

Spain

283

Australia

217

Mexico

215

Brazil

212

China

194

Figure 1. Students viewing content by week for the March 2014 MOOC. 79 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


While an overall attrition rate of almost 90% based on total registration may seem alarming, one must consider that MOOC platforms generally have no restrictions on student registration. Any students, regardless of their qualifications or level of interest in the material, can register for a course. Only by sampling the posted course materials can students decide whether a class is a good match for their abilities and interests. The inclusive model of MOOCs stands in contrast to traditional colleges and universities, which have an office of admissions to select qualified students, prerequisites for many courses, relatively high tuition costs, and limited seat availability. The effect of student attrition can be seen in the student activity logs of the MOOC. Daily student activity, measured as an estimate of time-on-task in the course, shows characteristic peaks and valleys (Figure 2). The peaks correspond to the weekly release of new content and assignment deadlines. Total activity decreases over time as students drop the course.

Figure 2. Daily student time-on-task for the March 2014 MOOC. During the course, students viewed video content, accessed readings, and worked through homework sets. An invaluable part of the course was its discussion board, which served as the primary means of personal communication in the course. In the introductory content of week 1, students who encountered difficulties or questions were encouraged to seek clarification through the course discussion board. Additionally, each course page contained a link to give students direct access to the discussion area of the course. The instructor and three Davidson undergraduates, all of whom had been part of the beta-testing group, moderated the discussion board. In total, the discussion board for the first run of the MOOC generated over 5,100 individual posts. Approximately 3,900 posts were made by 1,100 different students. The course staff was responsible for the other 1,200 posts. Posts ranged from content-related questions to requests for technical assistance with web browsers. In general, the MOOC students were highly appreciative of and even surprised to receive personal attention on the discussion board. The interactions were almost exclusively pleasant, and advanced MOOC 80 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


students frequently helped answer the questions of others. For the Davidson student moderators in particular, the opportunity to interact with an international audience, including many students with Ph.D. degrees in scientific fields, was a valuable learning and confidence-building experience. One discussion board interaction stands out from the others as illustrative of community building that can occur in a MOOC. In the fifth week of the course, a student with a chemistry Ph.D. assertively declared that a specific question in the course was unfair and deceptive. The student was particularly frustrated because the question was the first he had missed in the entire course. By the fifth week of the class, the number of active students had dropped to less than 2,000. The number of students who regularly interacted on the discussion board was much smaller, perhaps only 200. The dissatisfied student was not among the regular crowd, and his strong comments were not well-received by the other discussion board participants. Without any intervention from the instructional staff, the complaint was quickly and peaceably put down by the discussion board community. This interaction has two positive highlights. First, despite some opinions that high attrition is a sign of poor student engagement by MOOCs, many students are in fact deeply invested in MOOCs and sincerely strive to perform their best. The dissatisfied student was upset because he genuinely cared about the class. Second, MOOCs do create an online community of learners. If someone enters that community and displays antisocial behavior, the community will indeed address the problem and restore order. These are traits that one may not expect to encounter in a seemingly anonymous and faceless online environment. At the close of the course in May, 822 students had an overall score of at least 70%, which had been set as the passing mark for the course. Students who passed received a certificate of achievement. Institutions that offer MOOCs commonly report the percentage of students who passed the course. This value is difficult to determine because the number of students in a MOOC is constantly changing. For example, for the first run of the course, 15,991 students registered, but many entered the course after it was already complete. The very late students had no chance to pass the course. Analysis of the course logs revealed that the latest date by which a student was able to register for the course and still pass was April 5, 2014 – almost a month after the launch of the course. The number of students in the course at the end of April 5th was 13,036. Based on this total, the 822 passing students equate to a certification percentage of 6.3%. This percentage is in line with certification rates reported by other institutions (18). Further analysis of the student activity logs revealed that, in order to pass the class, a student must have completed at least five weeks of the course content. From Figure 1 (above), 1,749 students viewed at least the first five weeks of content. Of these students, only 1,503 were enrolled by April 5, 2014. These 1,500 students were sufficiently engaged in the material to pass the class. Approximately 55% of these engaged students earned a passing grade. Finally, of the 201 students who paid for ID verification, 163 students passed the course for a certification rate of 81%. All the verified students registered by April 5th, but 28 did not view more than four weeks of content. The 173 verified students who did view at least five weeks of material passed at a rate of 93%. 81 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

Although the course closed in May 2014, 18 month later in November 2015 around 20 students per week continued to access the class content. Some students read the HTML content, and others re-watch videos.


Preparing for a Second Iteration Once the first run of the course closed, plans were made to repeat the MOOC in fall 2014. The decision to reoffer the course was driven by two opportunities: a partnership with Novartis and the possible use of the MOOC content in Davidson’s residential medicinal chemistry course. A new collaboration with Novartis, specifically the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), provided access to practicing scientists in the drug industry. For the second run of the MOOC, five interviews of NIBR scientists were recorded for inclusion in the supplementary materials of the course. In addition, interviews with two Davidson alumni – one an intellectual property attorney and the other an executive in a biotech company – were also bundled into the MOOC. Each interview was 15-20 minutes in length. The interviews gave the MOOC students an opportunity to hear professional researchers speak in the language of their field about the different class topics. Beyond the addition of interviews, the first version of the MOOC was completely reviewed for potential improvements. Based upon feedback from the discussion board, confusing assessment questions and activities were clarified or exchanged for better problems. Exercises that created issues in the first MOOC iteration often suffered from unclear or subtle use of language. Because MOOCs draw an international audience, questions must be asked through direct and simple language structures. Some questions that might be appropriate for college students in the United States may translate poorly to a MOOC. This idea is especially true for questions that might require more expository text to set up the problem. The first iteration of the MOOC relied intensively upon web-based content. As opposed to hosting original content created by third parties, “linking out” to materials significantly reduces the number of page permissions that must be secured by the MOOC development team. A consequence of using hyperlinks to access content is that links routinely break. A portion of the revision process was dedicated to checking all the hyperlinks in the course. Using a MOOC in a Residential Course Blending of the MOOC with Davidson’s residential medicinal chemistry course (CHE 374) in fall 2014 required no changes to the MOOC, but the formerly lecture-based residential course was completely reorganized. The residential class was split into two halves. The first half was seven weeks, matching the length of the MOOC. During these weeks, 18 students in CHE 374 were enrolled into a private instance of the MOOC on the edX platform. The students worked through the MOOC content outside of class. Class time, which was no longer needed for lectures, was used for either question-and-answer sessions on the MOOC content or discussions of literature articles. Literature discussions were based 82 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


upon selected research or review articles, which were assigned in addition to the MOOC content with discussion prompts. The class worked through the prompts during class, and students were encouraged to make additional observations. The role of the faculty member was as a facilitator instead of as a lecturer. After seven weeks, the private MOOC content had been completed, and the residential course reverted back to a traditional, lecture-based format. Medicinal chemistry topics, namely QSAR and pharmaceutical synthesis, which were not included in the MOOC, were presented in class. Some class time was also dedicated to planning class presentations as the final project of the course. The presentations covered the discovery and advancement of important classes of drugs (e.g., selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) within the context of the topics covered in the MOOC. The 18 reidential students were divided into six groups of three, and each group was assigned a drug class. The presentations were 20 minutes in length and submitted as YouTube videos of PowerPoint presentations with recorded voice-over. The students viewed the videos in class. Four of the six presentations were judged to be of sufficiently high quality and were added to the MOOC to create an eighth week of online content. As soon as the private MOOC ended for the residential students, the MOOC launched publicly for its second iteration on the edX platform. Because the Davidson students had already worked through the MOOC content, the residential students were able to serve as discussion board moderators for the online students. Through moderating the discussion board and helping the online students, the Davidson students reinforced their learning of course material. Each Davidson student was placed in a group of three, and each group was assigned a two-hour moderation block on one day of the week. The instructor covered moderation for the seventh day and other times when the students were not assigned to the discussion board. Overall, the use of the MOOC content in conjunction with the residential medicinal chemistry course was positive based upon student surveys. The instructional content in the MOOC was well received by the residential students. The only serious problem with the MOOC was that the assessment materials were not fully up to the academic standards of a 300-level chemistry course. As a result, the average grade for the Davidson students on the MOOC content was very high at 96%. The high MOOC grade created false expectations for the level of difficulty for the other parts of the residential course, and adjusting those expectations was a recurring challenge for the instructor. Increased classroom discussions that the MOOC allowed were very beneficial. The Davidson students were exposed to more medicinal chemistry literature and applications of the theory because the residential course was blended with the MOOC. The residential students did not indicate that the combined workload of the MOOC and supplemental readings and presentation was excessive. Having the Davidson students moderate the MOOC discussion board was less positive. The overall quality of the second iteration of the MOOC was higher than the first iteration. Errors were minimized, and the questions in the MOOC were clearer. Discussion board posts in the second iteration were therefore also of a higher quality and tended to extend beyond the MOOC content. For example, in the first MOOC, a typical question might have been “How do I work question 5?” 83 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


In the second MOOC, that question had become “If question 5 were focused on X instead of Y, would the answer still be the same?” Faced with questions that frequently extended beyond the course content, the residential student moderators were less willing to venture a response to any but the most basic requests for help. Furthermore, the amount of traffic on the discussion was lighter in the second run (see below) so the discussion board had fewer questions to manage than in the first iteration. The combination of fewer yet more challenging discussion board questions, resulted in some anxiety in the residential students and caught the instructor off-guard. The residential students knew their discussion board interactions were being evaluated as part of their class grade. With few answerable questions, the students had concern over how they would be graded. The details of grading ultimately overshadowed the potential interaction between the online and residential students. The opportunity for reinforcing learning was largely lost. The class presentations were a great success. Perhaps because the residential students knew the presentations might be posted in the MOOC, the students prepared very high quality lectures with clear graphics and clean audio. All students used the standard software, microphone, and camera available in most laptop computers to create their presentations. Receiving feedback from the online students was particularly valuable for the Davidson students. The student presentation component of the residential course was the experience most appreciated by the Davidson students based on focus group feedback. October 2014 MOOC Launch The revised MOOC released on the edX platform in October with 5,089 students at launch. The class eventually attracted 10,867 students. As with the previous iteration, students could register under the categories of audit, honor code, and ID verified, with 115 selecting ID verification in the second run. Geographic distribution of the online students by continent and country was proportionately almost identical to the first run of the course (see Tables 1 and 2, above). There were, regardless, some noticeable differences between the first and second run of the course. The second instance of the MOOC was easier to manage than the first as the most problematic parts of the course had been improved. As a result of the revisions as well as the lower enrollment, the traffic volume on the discussion board was less in the second run. In total, only around 1,800 posts were made to the board in comparison to over 5,100 in the first run. Nearly 1,300 of the posts were from students, and the other 500 were from course staff and student moderators. The newly added interviews with pharmaceutical professionals attracted some comments and questions from students. Student activity in the MOOC also changed between the two iterations of the course. In the first course, total student time-on-task showed peaks of activity around weekly content releases and grading deadlines (Figure 2, above). In the second run, content was still released on a weekly schedule, but the deadline for all assignments was set at the very end of the course. This change was implemented to allow late-arriving students to participate fully in the content and have a chance 84 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


to earn a certificate. The time-on-task data again showed weekly peaks, but the valleys were not as pronounced and the activity spiked at the end as students met the final deadline (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Daily student time-on-task for the October 2014 MOOC.

As with the first run of the course, the number of students who should be considered as potentially passing and engaged must be explicitly defined. The latest date on which a student was able to register for the course and pass with at least a 70% grade was December 14th. This date was set as the cutoff for students to be able to pass the class. At this date, the class had 6,976 registrants. A total of 367 of these students managed to pass the course for an overall certification rate of 5.3%. Shifting the final deadline of the course to the last day of the course did not have a very large impact on the number of students who received a certificate. Of the 367 students who passed the course, 23 joined the course at least a month after the start date and still managed to earn an overall score of 70% or higher. For the second run of the course, only students who worked into week 7 of the course were able to pass. This number is different from the first run, in which students only needed to work into week 6. Note that the two courses did not have identical graded assignments so the minimum weekly completion requirement can differ between the two versions of the course. For the second run, 627 students both registered by December 14th and completed at least seven weeks of content. This particular subgroup of students had a passing rate of 58%, very similar to the 55% observed in the first instance. A total of 73 of the 115 ID verified students earned a certificate, corresponding to a rate of 63%. When the 36 ID verified students who did not work past the sixth week of the course are excluded, the certification rate jumps to 91% for ID verified students. 85 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.


Preparing for a Third Iteration The MOOC is currently being revised for a third run in October 2015. Changes to the MOOC between the first and second iteration were mostly made in reaction to problems in the course (e.g., unclear questions that confused students or readings that poorly reinforced the content). Current revisions are focused on adding new lessons to fill gaps in the original material. To prevent the course from becoming bloated, less critical content and questions that are trivially easy have been condensed or removed. Conversations with scientists at Novartis, which continues to collaborate on the course, have steered some of the content decisions and ensured that the course is as relevant as possible to industrial practices. Virtual laboratories have also been incorporated. The laboratories have been inserted at the end of each week’s content. In the new exercises, students use freely-available online tools to predict physiochemical and biological properties of molecules that students propose as potential drug leads. Online tools and databases include Molinspiration (21), DrugBank (22), admetSAR (23), and IUPHAR/BPS’s Guide to Pharmacology (24). The exercises encourage students to design molecules with predicted activities and properties. The students then share their structures through the discussion board so that other students can view them and make further modifications and improvements. During the second course run, one virtual lab was inserted into week seven of the course to test whether students would participate in such an activity. Analysis of the student data showed that the single virtual lab resulted in 202 posts to the discussion board. That number is nearly 11% of the 1,855 posts made during the entire course run. It is hoped that deliberate placement of virtual labs into all weeks of the MOOC will dynamically increase student engagement. Another important change for the MOOC is the inclusion of pre- and post-tests, which allow quantification of learning gains through calculation of a growth score (25). Pre- and post-tests were included in the second iteration of the MOOC. The growth score results for both the MOOC and residential students were encouraging and within expected ranges, but the test questions were not uniformly conceptual in nature. A revised test should afford growth scores that can be interpreted with greater confidence. The quantitative learning data will in turn drive design improvements in later iterations of the MOOC. In fall 2015, the MOOC material will continue to be used in Davidson’s residential medicinal chemistry course as it was in fall 2014. Two major changes are planned. First, the residential students will not be required to moderate the MOOC discussion board. Second, the residential students will be given supplementary homework sets on the MOOC content to boost the perceived rigor of the residential course.

Conclusion A MOOC on medicinal chemistry has been created for the instruction of both online and residential students. The course has been well received and seems to be an efficient means of presenting the class content. The inherent online nature of MOOCs makes the courses a promising method for increasing student access 86 Sörensen; Online Course Development and the Effect on the On-Campus Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2016.

to quality chemistry educational resources. The use of MOOCs within residential courses allows for a more highly interactive and discussion-based classroom to increase student engagement. Continued experimentation with MOOCs both online and in residential classes will allow for the collection of data to quantify the effectiveness of MOOCs as an educational tool.


Acknowledgments I thank the members of the DavidsonX team mentioned in this chapter for the opportunity to work with them during the creation of the MOOC. I also thank both Novartis for funding and Drs. Russette Lyons and Ross Tracy, NIBR staff members, for coordinating NIBR scientist interviews. Finally, I thank Dr. Daniel Seaton for extracting the MOOC activity information from the edX data logs.

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Creation of a Medicinal Chemistry MOOC as a Teaching Tool for Both

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