I’m taking the “online” session of General Chemistry I. All the homework is done online, and we only physically meet six times, three Friday/Saturday session pairs. Yesterday was the orientation, which included watching video presentations on how to use lab glassware and instruments, and on safety. Today we had the first two labs. The next session about six weeks will have two more labs and the midterm exam, and the final session in mid-December will have two labs and the final exam. There will also be two labs to be completed at home.
The first lab was on measuring the mass, volume, and density of solids and liquids. The second was paper chromatography. It was actually fairly fun.
I had three semesters of chemistry in high school, and i liked it back then. In fact, it was one of the few high school classes in which I got good grades, and I was given an award by the American Chemical Society. Back then I thought I might want to go into chemical engineering or petroleum engineering, but for better or worse, I stuck with my core competency, computer programming.
Anyhow, a quarter century later I wasn’t sure whether I’d still like chemistry. I don’t think I remember too much from the high school class, and the college G.C. I is definitely more advanced. Chromatography was near the end of high school chemistry, but at the beginning of this one. I expect I’ll have to do a lot of studying, but I’m optimistic that I can get a good grade.
The sessions are officially from 3:00 to 8:00 PM on Friday, and 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Saturday. Yesterday we finished by about 5:30 PM, and today by about 1:30 PM. Since the future sessions will include exams and the labs will probably be more complex, I doubt we’ll get out as early.
The online portion uses a web site called OWL, which is somewhat annoying for a few reasons. It requires Shockwave, which in not the same as Flash, despite the common usage of the misnomer “Shockwave Flash”. Shockwave isn’t available for Linux, so I’ve had to use OWL from Windows, which is somewhat inconvenient for me. I’m going to try using CrossOver Office, which apparently does support Shockwave. I signed up for the 30 day demo of Crossover Office, and if it works out I’ll buy CrossOver Office Professional.
The notation for entering subscripts and superscripts is strange and error-prone. If you miss one part of a multi-part question, you have to redo the whole thing, and since the problems are dynamically generated, you really do have to start the problem from scratch.
“Chapter 0″ concerned a review of algebra as needed for chemistry, including logarithms and exponentials. In a fair number of problems, the program asks you to solve an equation for a particular unknown, by adding and/or multiplying expressions to both sides of the equation. That’s fine, but the program doesn’t seem to be aware that multiplication is commutative, so on a length multipart question it considered my answer wrong the first two times I worked the problem, just because in the final equation I put the multiplied terms in a different order than it expected. If I’m going to be tested on algebra, it should be by a program that actually “knows” algebra.