E-Learning and Blended Learning in Chemistry Education

If the last decade was of the rise of online content, the coming one is likely going to focus on how best to use this content in the teaching and learning of the chemistry curriculum. The boundary between online material and the content as delivered in the lecture hall is becoming increasingly blurred, as educators seek to use the online space to support and supplement their in-class teaching. Online materials can be used to prepare for lectures or laboratories and supplement lecture content with additional explanatory material. Classroom conversation can move online to discussion boards, and there is a diversity in assessment methods available, often automated, which allows students to get immediate feedback on their understanding of a topic. The lecturer's toolkit has expanded enormously, and the difficulty is likely to center on how best to design the curriculum delivery to meaningfully incorporate learning technologies so that they enhance learning in and out of the classroom. In this chapter, we present a series of learning technologies, some better known than others, with an emphasis on how they may be usefully incorporated into the twenty-first century classroom. We advocate these technologies by basing them on what is known about how people learn. In order to be useful to practitioners in higher education, we supplement them with examples from the chemistry practice literature.