4 credit chemistry with lab DL

Was wondering if anyone knew of any 4 credit chemistry courses with an online lab. I am interested in a course that doesn't require any campus requirements. Would much prefer this than having to take at the local community college. Got very spoiled taking online courses! This course is needed by the end of the sumer
Look forward to your help!
Thanks,
Donna

 

You might look at Texas Tech. I am not sure if they have Chemistry or not, but you could see. I sorta doubt they would have the lab available without attendance, though.

http://www.de.ttu.edu/content/asp/start.asp

clint

 

As an old Cal Poly biology major that did the chem sequence up through organic and biochemistry, I don't think that it's possible. And even if it is, you might be missing a lot by skipping the labs.

Part of taking a chemistry lab is learning to use the laboratory apparatus, learning safety procedures and developing lots of hands-on technique.

There are some subjects that simply aren't appropriate for DL, and chemistry laboratories are one of them.

I would suggest doing the course in-person through a local college, then transferring it into whatever DL program you are enrolled in. If you are in a laboratory science, you may have to do quite a bit of that.

 

As perhaps an equally old UW chemistry major who did a MSc in analytical chemistry over 20 years ago, I agree with you up to a point. I have recently seen some DL chemistry courses with online labs. These labs were either for simple experiments that could be done at home or were computer simulations that were run online.

However, and this is an important point, these courses were all 100 level courses (first year). I would imagine that any chemistry courses beyond the first year would not prove very amenable to online labs, and certainly not any that required actual wet chemistry or operation of instrumentation.

The only exception to this that comes to mind were some DL graduate chemistry courses in which the labs were all computer labs. These primarily involved computer manipulation of molecules and analysis of spectra. Very interesting, and quite a far distance from my thesis topic where I spent weeks slaving away over a hot HP gas chromatograph\mass spectrometer analyzing barbituates in urine.

As for the original poster, she may wish to check the American Chemical Society's website at www.acs.org, where I believe I have read about some online and DL chemistry courses given by a number of institutions.

Regards,

Michael Lloyd
Mill Creek, Washington

 

Hi Michael. Yeah, I've heard about that too.

Upon further consideration, I'll say this about Donna's question: The answer probably depends on why she wants to take the chemistry class, and precisely what kind of chemistry class she needs.

If she is a chemistry major or something similar, biology, pre-med or some other health, engineering or science field, she probably needs to smell all the familiar chem lab stinks. (It's almost 30 years and I still remember them!) She needs the heavyweight chemistry-for-majors kind of class, which probably has to be taken in person.

Since she asked about a four unit chem class, I jumped to the conclusion that's what she wanted, but now I'm not so sure. Lots of chemistry for scientists classes are five units (or more). And she didn't specify the precise course that she wanted, and she would have had it been a major course. Instead she just wanted the right number of units, which suggests that it's just a general-ed requirement. That's something different.

If she just needs a chem class with lab in order to meet a general-ed lab science requirement for an unrelated major, she could probably do OK if she can find a DL lab course. I withdraw my objection in that case.

Now the problem is finding her a suitable class that fits her timeframe.

The same thing seems to happen in engineering. Undergraduate engineering requires hands-on labs and doesn't really lend itself to DL. But there are a number of DL masters programs in engineering where lots of computer labs are involved.

I took an instrumentation class at Cal Poly way back in the early 70's and I still remember the terrible frustrations I suffered trying to get usable results out of a gas chromatograph. I spent endless hours in there with dissapointingly few solid results to show for it. (Hopefully the technology has improved since then.)

But that's the point I was trying to make, I guess. Unless you put in that hands on time, you won't ever learn to make it work.

There's this thing among Ph.D.s about how their suffering as a graduate student was a rite of passage. Unless subsequent students suffer equally, they won't have real doctorates. And I've always been skeptical and dismissive of that because I couldn't see most of it serving any purpose.

But in the laboratory sciences where instrumental technique is involved, from spectrometry through biological dissection to microscopy, the frustration that students suffer really does serve a necessary purpose. It's like learning to play a musical instrument.

 

www.ccconline.org

Chemistry 111 w/lab 5 semester hours