The department has a long history of being one of the most inovative on campus for methods and approaches to education. We are justifiably proud of numerous teaching awards and honors given to our faculty. In addition to the teaching done by faculty who are also carrying out state-of-the-art research, much of our teaching is also carried out by faculty whose main scholarly work involves development of educational materials and approaches. Departmental resources for undergraduate teaching are excellent, strengthened by departmental and collaborative grants funded by agencies such as the Dreyfus Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Education. The Chemistry Resource Center and related, smaller sites within the department provide every chemistry student free computer and network access to online homework, databases, practice tutorials, and sophisticated computational tools for research. Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX based systems are available, allowing the students to gain experience in every major type of computer environment, if desired.

The Online Web-based Learning group (OWL) on campus pursues an ambitious program of creating online tutorials with automatic assessment, allowing the student to practice assignments and gain comfort with course material in his or her own time. In collaboration with other departments in the group, a committed group of faculty not only have drawn many hundreds of thousands of dollars in external funding to support OWL, but are also developing Web-based tools (such as structural drawing recognition online) to help students in ways that the printed word cannot do. OWL modules are being adopted by a number of universities around the country. Not only do undergraduates use this sophisticated learning resource, but they even have opportunities to help with its development as part
of the OWL Chemistry team.

The Chemistry Higher Education Workgroup (CHEW) pursues the development of mediabased learning resources. In collaboration with book publishers and with other departmental groups and faculty with similar interests, CHEW has already created a number of highly regarded CD-ROM electronic helper and homework resources for topics including materials science, chromatography, organic chemistry, and plastics. The CHEW group and its expertise provide a focal point for faculty and students interested in research in the area of media-assisted learning.

For participating faculty see Research Matrix.