The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a structure-based chemical identifier that encodes various aspects of a chemical structure into a hierarchically layered line notation. Because InChI is non-proprietary, open-source, and freely available to everyone, it is adopted in popular chemical information resources and software programs. This paper describes the InChI Open Education Resource (OER) (https://www.inchi-trust.org/oer/), designed to provide educators and other interested parties with resources, training material, and information related to InChI. Currently, the OER contains over 100 materials collected from various sources and provides users with search, filtering, and sorting functionalities to locate specific records. New relevant materials can be suggested by anyone, allowing the scientific community to share and find InChI-related resources. This paper will show how to use the InChI OER tag taxonomy to filter content and demonstrate two resources within the InChI OER; the ChemNames2LCSS Google Sheet and the InChILayersExplorer, an Excel spreadsheet that breaks an InChI into its layers. While the InChI OER is of value to a broader chemistry community, this paper seeks to reach out to chemical educators and provide them with an understanding of InChI and its role in the practice of science.

While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)’s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.

Student success in both general chemistry and upper-level chemistry courses requires the application of previously learned skills for carrying out calculations in exercises and problem solving. Students with weaknesses in mathematics often struggle in their chemistry courses. The Fall 2017 ConfChem conference, Mathematics in Undergraduate Chemistry Instruction, was held from October 26 through November 27, 2017, and contained eight papers that discussed a variety of approaches developed by instructors to facilitate student success with using mathematics in their chemistry courses. This report provides an introduction to the ConfChem 2017 conference and invites readers to participate in future discussions about how chemistry faculty members can empower student success with the mathematical skills needed for their chemistry courses.

One of the challenges associated with attending a BCCE (Biennial Conference in Chemical Education) is choosing which talks to attend, because there are often concurrent talks in different symposia in which participants are interested. These conflicts between multiple interests are especially challenging for members of the CCCE (Committee on Computers in Chemical Education) who organize symposia and workshops. Thus, the responsibility of presiding in talks of their own symposium precludes them from attending other symposia that interest them. This year, members of the CCCE organized four different symposia during the BCCE. Organizers of three of these symposia each invited two or three authors to present papers related to the use of computers in chemical education in a follow-up online ConfChem Conference. This approach allows participants who could not attend these talks to interact with authors, and also allows members of the broader chemical education community who could not attend the BCCE to benefit from these presentations.

The ACS CHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) ran the first intercollegiate OnLine Chemistry Course (OLCC) on Environmental and Industrial Chemistry in 1996, and is offering the seventh OLCC on Cheminformatics and Public Compound Databases: An Introduction to Big Data in Chemistry in 2017. This Communication summarizes the past, present, and future of OLCCs, which evolved out of the online ConfChem conferences that the CCCE has run since 1993. OLCCs actually pioneered the use of HTML papers before ConfChem did, as well as enabled discussions centered on different sections of a paper. OLCCs are technically hybrid courses involving local faculty facilitators who meet faceto-face with students and online guest lecturers who are experts in the topic of the OLCC. These not only allow schools to offer courses on topics they may not normally be able to offer, but open up the opportunity for collaborative teaching and learning across multiple institutions, both academic and nonacademic. This Communication summarizes one of the invited papers that was presented in the Select CCCE Presentations of the ACS CHED CCCE online ConfChem that was held from October 30 to November 25, 2016.

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVBook and Media Revie...Book and Media ReviewNEXTReview of Molecules That Amaze UsRobert E. Belford*View Author Information Department of Chemistry, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas 72204, United States*E-mail: [email protected]Cite this: J. Chem. Educ. 2016, 93, 4, 589–590Publication Date (Web):January 25, 2016Publication History Published online25 January 2016Published inissue 12 April 2016https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b01028https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b01028book-reviewACS PublicationsCopyright © 2016 The American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc. This publication is available under these Terms of Use. Request reuse permissions This publication is free to access through this site. Learn MoreArticle Views1136Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail PDF (361 KB) Get e-AlertscloseSUBJECTS:Materials,Molecules,Plants,Students Get e-Alerts