Project Overview:
This project focuses on finding, collecting, adapting/revising (where needed) and creating open educational resources (OER) of automated digital Chemistry solutions and feedback for first-year Chemistry Courses called the PASS (Platform Adapted Strategic Solutions) Framework. This framework can be used to help STEM instructors develop their solutions for open online homework systems and to use more OER in their courses.
As a team of discipline-focused and open learning design experts, we examined the design of the digital questions and how we could give timely and constructive feedback to our students. We completed a literature review to consider challenges students faced when completing practice questions, which highlighted students’ prior learning experiences, organizational issues, diversity, language and cultural contexts, and self-confidence (too much and too little).
We hope to encourage students to complete practice questions with automated solutions which should support a deeper and more meaningful understanding of Chemistry in foundational undergraduate courses. We intend to openly share the PASS Framework to elevate OER question sets to include answers/feedback with detailed solutions to support students through the learning process and help them understand what they may be doing incorrectly. This will ensure that any other disciplines that use open homework and questions for automated formative assessment, might also have access to our research and learning experiences.