Advanced treatment of basic mechanistic principles of modern organic chemistry. Topics include molecular orbital theory, orbital symmetry control of organic reactions, aromaticity, carbonium ion chemistry, free radical chemistry, the chemistry of carbenes and carbanions, photochemistry, electrophilic substitutions, aromatic chemistry.
OpenChem is first and foremost to extend the benefit that we have seen since 2009 from open and free publication of individual chemistry courses to an entire curriculum. What MIT did ten years ago with its OpenCourseWare initiative was to plant the idea of making quality educational resources universally accessible. The MOOCs have laudably extended this approach by providing instructional paths through individual courses at scale. What UCI hopes to do with this initiative is to present a coherent, full curriculum by a top faculty. Today, a learner can sit with us in our lecture halls and follow four years’ worth of chemistry core classes and electives. That is the key innovation: making a full undergraduate education’s worth of classes available for immediate incorporation in part or by institutions.
In the openly licensed format, UCI contributes to global chemistry education at no marginal cost to itself beyond the already completed filming. Our own students also benefit by being able to review presentations and because it is available on YouTube, we don’t have to worry about maintaining it on course pages behind password protection. By making it open, another institution or professor can use some or all of the video presentations without even having to contact us for permission. So we are fulfilling the mission of a land-grant, public university effectively and efficiently.
Melissa VanAlstine-Parris (Faculty)
This is a nice collection of ~50 minute, graduate level, video lectures covering organic reaction mechanisms. The quality of the content is very good. It is as effective as a straight lecture can be. It is pretty easy to use but if you are looking for a specific topic it takes a little searching because it is organized by weeks and the topics of each week are not listed.