The shift to online education has dealt several important pedagogical lessons in a very short time frame, none more so than approaches to assessments. This experience, coupled to improved access to education, will likely see online assessments remain as a major component of modern mainstream education. The powerful technologies that facilitate the…

The COVID-19 pandemic confronted chemistry instructors worldwide with many new challenges as they were quickly required to make the shift to remote instruction. One of these challenges was administering assessments in an online format. This was the topic of many discussions in the online support group Strategies for Teaching Chemistry (SFTC). This…

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition from traditional face-to-face lectures to online learning, as well as the adoption of technology-enabled active learning in the classroom, has been accelerated. Here, we introduce the use of Telegram as a technological tool to support remote learning by helping students identify gaps in their…

Acid-base chemistry, and in particular the Lewis acid-base model, is foundational to understanding mechanistic ideas. This is due to the similarity in language chemists use to describe Lewis acid-base reactions and nucleophile-electrophile interactions. The development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has led to the…

Digital automated assessment is a valuable and time-efficient tool for educators to provide immediate and objective feedback to learners. Automated assessment, however, puts high demands on the quality of the questions, alignment with the intended learning outcomes, and the quality of the feedback provided to the learners. We here describe the…

Administering exams in large enrollment courses is challenging and systems in place for accomplishing this task were upended in the spring of 2020 when a sudden transformation to online instruction and testing occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the following year, when courses remained online, approaches to improve exam security included…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has disrupted normal activities all over the world. Education at all levels has been particularly hard hit, and this has resulted in the suspension of face-to-face discourse, instruction, and student assessment worldwide, with the necessity of social…

The affordances given to a structured, timed, and proctored paper exam are not as readily applicable in a digital medium. Accordingly, the rapid shift from in-person to online enactments may have forced instructors to consider changing their assessment practices and priorities. As assessments convey strong implicit messages about "what…

Summative year end assessments are a major component of student assessment at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London. More than 600 students participate in over 40 different exams during the summer term. At the end of the spring term, the college moved to fully remote operation due to COVID-19, leaving the academic…

When campuses across the world needed to transition to the online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many challenges educators faced, and addressing academic integrity issues were some of the most important. Certain strategies, such as online proctoring or additional software, were not available to most institutions because the…

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention to online delivery of teaching and assessment within the higher education sector. This article will reflect on the laboratory assessment of chemistry to undergraduate students on a pharmaceutical science program in the UK. With students prohibited from accessing laboratory environments, associated…

Effective assessment is an extremely important area of chemistry education. Typically tests measure students' knowledge of critical thinking skills, chemistry vocabulary, and application of concepts from one chapter to another. While it is relatively straightforward to measure concepts such as chemical vocabulary and algorithmic problem solving…

Two key topics of many second-year organic chemistry courses are substitution and elimination reactions. Predicting and explaining substitution and elimination reactions tends to be a challenging task for students, as documented in the research literature. Motivated by the many documented challenges experienced by students when learning these…

In a technology-enhanced learning environment and underpinned by a unique hybrid pedagogic model that borrows from gamification, constructivism, and experiential learning approaches, badges were purposefully used to foster engagement. This approach promoted the development of a mindset that identifies and appreciates the worth of a portfolio of…

Computer quiz games are introduced to improve teaching and learning in a freshman engineering chemistry course in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) environment. These quiz games are developed and implemented as supplemental and augmentative tools to enhance traditionally delivered lectures. The paper shows an increase in students' motivation…