Moses Passer American Chemical Society Washington. DC 20036
I
Faculty Renewal-How
No sector of the scientific community has a greater need for continuing education than the teachers who are trainine the next generation of professionals. The loss to society from the technical obsolescence of a research scientist, considerable though it may he, can be no greater than the potential contribution of one individual. The loss to society from the technical obsolescence of a colleee teacher is multinlied manyfold in the form of poorly educated students. his multiolvine that all . . factor makes it criticallv- imoortant . available means he employed in an unceasing effort to combat technical obsolescence in the academic community. Many mechanisms are available to college teachers for achieving faculty renewal. The continuing education programs of the American Chemical Society comprise just one such mechanism. This paper will briefly describe four of these programs, with pa&ular attention to some current developments that may make them more accessible to colleee teachers. ACS Short Courses ACS Short Courses are concentrated (two to five full days) presentations of selected topics in chemistry, chemical engineering, and related subjects taught by small (one-to-threemember) teaching staffs. A pioneering effort among science and engineering societies, the Short Courses have been received exceptionally well, and more than 40,000 registrants have participated in the 15 years since the program began. Some 75-100 sessions are oresented annuallv-nationwide and year-round. Through the steady addition of new courses and the revision andlor elimination of older courses. the catalog is maintained a t about 50 titles. College chemistry teachers attended ACS Short Courses in large numbers during the first two years of the program when substantial subsidy by the American Chemical Society made i t possible to maintain registration fees a t a very low level. The Society could not, however, continue to provide this subsidy, and the program is required to he financially selfsustaining. The fee level necessary to realize this requirement poses no problem for the industrial chemist, whoseemployer almost invariably pays the hill. Academic institutions rarely, if ever, have any comparable financial capability, with the result that college chemistry teachers-those whose need for continuine education is at least as ereat as anvone's-either their participation out of their own pockets or must else do without. In most cases. unfortunatelv. their oersoual circumstances oblige them t o d o without. his problem has generated more correspondence and discussion than any other in the history of the program. The ACS Short Courses Academic Fellowships proposal has been developed to deal with the problem. This program would enable college teachersto attend ACS Short Courses on a cost-sharing basis: (1) ACS would waive 35 percent of the regular registration fee to reflect savings in marketing costs and in certain administrative casts. (2) The college teacher would pay 10 percent of the regular registration fee. This requirement is based on a belief that an individual with some financial involvement in a course Presented at the Symposium on Faculty Renewal and Development, ACS National Meeting, Las Vegas, August 1980. 844 / Journal of Chemical Education
ACS Can Help
will probably invest mare effort in it and get more out of it than if it were free.At the same time, the financialinvolvement should not be burdensome. (3) The Academic Fellowships fund would pay the difference-55 percent. Academic-Industrial Interaction. The proeram does not envisage special courses for academics. ath her, all the academic fellows would attend regularly scheduled ACS Short Courses in the company of chemistsand chemical engineers from industry and government, giving all of them the opportunity to interact with each other. The significance of such exchange and communication goes back to the fact that many college teachers are isolated from and know very little about industry-notwithstanding that the great majority of their -maduates enter careers in industrv. The absence of a vieorous "industry-academe interface" has been and remains a source of great concern. The attendance of academics a t ACS Short Co&es can become an important way to help increase exchanges at this interface. Financial support for this program is being sought, not from any single source, hut rather from a multiplicity of sources-government agencies, private foundations, and industry. By not being dependent on a single support source the program should, to that extent, not be vulnerable to the sudden collapse that the end of that support can cause. Some grants have already been received, but the program will begin only when adequate support is in hand to see it through a t least its first year. ACS Audlo Courses ACS Audio Courses are study units a t the college and professional levels in chemistry, chemical engineering, and related subjects. Each course includes an audiotape, but the tape is onlv Dart of the unit. The comolete course is an inteerated coihination of the tape with a'print reference manual that contains all the visuals-tables. . e- r a.~ h .s references. . nroh.. lems-that a speaker would normally use in a classroom presentation. The course is designed so that neither taoe nor manual is complete by itself. TI;P rwnare clos~lginteirated, and when used together thev do deliver the suh~ectn,mpletely. The listene; is thus obiiged to follow the manual while listening to the tape, and by so using two perceptors-sight and hearing-instead of one, is stimulated to participate actively rather than ahsorb passively. The program was estahlished in 1971. The 1980 catalog includes about 60 titles and is growing rapidly. The courses are beine used not onlv throuehout the United States hut worldwiie: at last countin ahout 40 foreign countries, despite the fact that thev are all in Enelish. One applicati(m of ACS ~ u d i o Courses that has great potential is their use fnr do-it-vourselfcontinuine education t,v various groups such as the ;hemistry faculty 2 a college, dr teachers from several schools in a communitv. A erouo that wishes to run a do-it-yourself course by this dethob acsuires one copy of the complete unit, plus one coov of the manual for e\,ery participant. The gwup also selecrsone of its memhera who is reasonably fam~liarwith the subject matter to serve m a local tutor. It is this person's responsibility to become familiar with the course in advance so that he or she can lead discussion sessions. This method works quite well, and the cost per participant is very modest.
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ACS Video Courses ACS Video Courses are integrated combinations of a video medium with a print manual, analogous to the Audio Courses. The program, however, has not been growing rapidly, because their costs have been quite high. This aspect, however, is changing rapidly. The initial production cost of filmlvideo program material has always been high, and this initial cost is not about to change. In the past, moreover, replication costs for film prints have also been high. The recent advent of the videocassette and now the videodisc, however, is rapidly reducing replication costs to far lower levels-a development that can revolutionize the educational use of video materials. Because replication costs will soon he so much lower, it should he possible to amortize initial production costs over a large number of prints rather than just a few, and therefore to market the product a t substantially lower prices than in the past. This development should stimulate the production and distribution of ACS Video Courses on a much larger scale than has been possible so far. When this happens, visual media can achieve the power as educational tools that has been the subject of much speculation for many years, hut which has yet to he realized except
in isolated instances. Individuals will be able to use these media for personal study in their own homes, at their own pace, and under conditions uniquely defined for each person. ACS Computer Courses ACS Computer Courses is the newest ACS program in continuing education. It is so new that only now is the first of these courses about to be released. Here, also, rapidly advancing technology should make these courses farmo;e accessible to users than was considered possible only avery short time aeo. Until recently, nnlg large mainframe computers had the ca~acitvnerded for an ACS rontinuinc educauon course. This meantthat taking the course entaired an expenditure for computer time, which could become quite expensive. Today, however, the rapid development of microprocessor technology has reached the stage where small home computers have adequate capacity for ACS courses. The million-dollar mainframe computer is no longer needed, and computer time is no longer a cost factor. The comment made above for video media, therefore, will apply equally here: ". . .computer media can achieve the power as educational tools. . . ."
Volume 57, Number 12. December 1980 / 845
