Webinar & Adoption Plans

We hostd a webinar for HBCUs on June 24, 2025 about REAL CHEM's mission and development, a brief product demonstration, and insights from current users. 

DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION SLIDES ON REAL CHEM FOR HBCUs   

RECORDING of the HBCU AL$ Webinar on REAL CHEM

  Join Our Community  

If you’d like to be a member of the REAL CHEM faculty research community and apply for the research community stipend, please complete the following form:   Brief Survey

Feel free to pass this along to your Chemistry colleagues if you think others might be interested in exploring these technologies.

   GROUP ADOPTION:   

APLU (Association for Public & Land-grant Universities) leads higher education community projects that bring innovations and improvements to institutions. 

Faculty Commitment:   Teach their course with the REAL CHEM courseware in the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters.

The Course:  General Chemistry I courses intended for science, engineering, or pre-med students- not the allied health or general education versions. The course must be delivered either face-to-face or synchronously online.

• $8,000 Institutional support.
• Cross institutional community of practice for departments and faculty.
• Guidance in developing a scalable flexible learning environment to support institutional strategic goals
• Coaching from a faculty subject matter expert who has experience with REAL CHEM

Multiple faculty in the Chemistry Department would need to participate in the APLU project.  Sharing and evaluting the collective experiences of using REAL CHEM and translating the lessons learning into recommended practices and policies comes from the collaborative community of faculty.

     INDIVIDUAL ADOPTION:    

If you’d like to adopt REAL CHEM for your course in the Fall 2025 and participate in a faculty community of practice.

MERLOT, PIP, and REAL CHEM will support a your participation by:

• Working with your bookstore to streamline your adoption and LMS integration.

• Providing professional development webinars to help you effectively and efficiently adopt REAL CHEM in your course.

• Providing virtual community meetings for faculty sharing their experiences, issues, and insights about REAL CHEM.

• Providing a $1,000 stipend for a limited # of faculty (due to limited funds).  

YOUR COMMITMENT

1. Adopt REAL Chem as an Affordable Learning Solutions (est. $35/student).

2. Tell your story about your experience (in a blog post, ePortfolio, video, conference presentation, etc.)

3. Participate in most of the virtual meetings with other faculty and REAL CHEM staff

    RESEARCH ADOPTION   

Digital Promise, a non-profit organization supporting research on educational innovations, supports the adoption and research on the impact of REAL CHEM on student learning, faculty teaching, and institutional performance.   If selected by Digital Promise, they will provide minigrants to your department:

Faculty Commitment:   Teach their course as usual in Fall 2025, and integrate the courseware in Spring 2026.

The Course: 4- or 5-credit General Chemistry I courses intended for science, engineering, or pre-med students- not the allied health or general education versions. The course must be delivered either face-to-face or synchronously online.  Digital Promise is focusing solely on the lecture component of the course.

For those participating in the Digital Promise research:

• Institutional Support is currently capped at $5,000. Most participating institutions will be eligible for this amount by participating and providing Institutional Research Office (IRO) data for:

  • Fall 2025, teaching without using the courseware, and

  • Spring 2026, while adopting the courseware.

• A subset of participants may qualify for an additional $3,000 (totaling $8,000) by providing additional data pulls after each of the following terms:

  • Fall 2025, teaching without using the courseware,

  • Spring 2026, while adopting the courseware, and

  • Fall 2026, continuing to teach with courseware.

Please note: this higher tier of support will be limited to institutions we identify as having especially promising use cases.

• Instructors: Up to ~$2,000 total EACH for:
  • $750 for the “business as usual” (BAU) semester [fall 2025];
  • $1,250 for their first semester using the courseware [spring 2026]; .

Digital Promise provides you excellent support for conducting research!  You teach your best, and they care of the rest! 

• Review the Research Plan: Working with you, plan the research project at aligns with your course.
• IRB Approval:  Support completing IRB requirements on your campus.
• Student Survey: Distributed about two-thirds into the semester; includes questions on student self-reported demographics, instructor evidence-based teaching practices, and student motivation, engagement, and persistence.
• Instructor Survey: Mirrors the student survey with similar questions tailored for instructors.
• Instructor Weekly Time Log: A brief weekly questionnaire (~3–4 questions) about how instructors allocate their time across in-class, out-of-class, and student interaction activities.
• Paired Questions ACS Assessment: Instructors are asked to use the 2017 version of this assessment at the end of the term to evaluate students’ conceptual and computational understanding.
• Institutional Research Office (IRO) Data: Collected as part of the institutional involvement.
• Write up the research for scholarly presentation/ publication.