Web Courses in Freshman Chemistry

Four web sites were developed for teaching four sections of freshman chemistry: two sites for science majors, and two sites for pre-nursing majors. The web sites are stand-alone sites linking to WebCT for online testing, bulletin boards discussions, email, and posting of grades. This paper briefly describes the web site development and some comparison of scores of students in two sections of the same science majors' course: one was taught totally online and one was taught totally on campus. Comparing test scores on proctored tests in the science majors' courses, the students in the on-campus course made better scores on the chapter testing than the students in the online course, but the students in the online course scored better on the final exam than the students in the on-campus course. However, the standard deviations of the exam scores of the courses only allows for a "no significant difference" conclusion on the proctored test scores. The two-semester American Chemical Society (ACS) standardized exam scores favored the online students.