General Information that applies
to all of Dr. Bodwin's Courses on ChemBits.com
There are a lot of things that are useful to have handy, but don't apply to
a single class. This is the place for those "General Information" items.
Background,
Policies, and Expectations:
Roles,
Requirements, and Expectations for the course
Syllabus
The
Responsible
Learner
Time
Management
Textbook
"Chemistry
2e" from OpenStax)
Textbooks
The academic textbook market is an interesting space.
Traditional commercial publishers provide a valuable service to authors
and consumers alike, but the cost of traditional textbooks can be a little
beyond the reach of some students. In many cases, the foundational
knowledge of a field does not change significantly over the course of 5-10
years (if not longer...), so the benefit of a $100-300 shiny new textbook
is minimal. For this, and a variety of other reasons, I have embraced the
Open Educational Resource (OER) philosophy and strive to choose OER
textbooks and other resources for my classes. A couple important notes:
- I will not choose an OER textbook just because it is OER. I review
these textbooks and I will only adopt them if I feel that they are of
sufficient quality to provide a useful resoruce for my students.
- Just because an OER is "freely available" for students to use does not
mean that it is a magically free piece of knowledge that was
mysteriously plucked from the ether. Compiling a textbook takes work.
Writing a textbook takes work. The creative people who perform this work
should be recognized and compensated for their efforts. This is why I
feel it is important to recognize the organizations and generous donors
who make OERs possible.
General Chemistry - "Chemistry 2e" (from OpenStax)
General, Organic, & Biochemistry - "Introduction to Chemistry" (from Saylor Academy)
All information on this page is produced by Jeffrey
Bodwin, Copper Sun Creations, or curated from the attributed source.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.