Community-based approaches to curriculum development and dissemination

CHED 462

Julie A. Haack, jhaack@uoregon.edu, Department of Chemistry, University of Oregon, 1253 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1253
Green chemistry is facilitating a community-based approach to curriculum development. Because green chemistry represents a principle-based approach to the design and manufacture of chemical products and processes, it is providing educators with a uniquely flexible and interdisciplinary framework for the development of new educational materials. This flexibility is effectively empowering a diverse community of educators to design and disseminate new educational materials that focus on the incorporation of green chemistry principles across the chemistry curriculum. This presentation will describe a novel, community-based project that integrates the identification and development of new laboratory experiments at regionally distributed “ambassador” sites with dissemination via the GEMs database. GEMs is an interactive, web-accessible collection of Greener Education Materials for Chemists that includes laboratory exercises, lecture materials, course syllabi and multimedia content. The URL for the GEMs database is http://greenchem.uoregon.edu/gems.html