Teaching Lab Protocols Now Freely Shared
Boston University Chemistry has launched a new Digital Common site for organic chemistry teaching lab protocols. According to Prof. John Snyder, “developing a freely accessible, dynamic data base of sophomore organic lab experiments was driven by the reality that we were creating most of our sophomore course labs rather than relying on a lab textbook. In fact, many colleges and universities are doing the same. As PFFs from our department have gone on to faculty positions, the potential for having a large number of talented contributors to the database became rather obvious.” Early users / contributors include PFF alumna Prof. Amy Bradley (Wilkes University) and Prof. Lauren Rossi (Roger Williams University). Instrumental in developing the free access database is current PFF, Dr. Seann Mulcahy.
The BU Digital Common is an open access repository, which means that the full text of the work deposited here is freely accessible to the world via the web. BU Chemistry organic lab instructors have placed protocols developed over the years to be freely and easily accessible to other instructors. Users can download and modify these protocols to use in their own courses as they see fit. Users may also be granted upload privileges to deposit modified or new protocols that will be of use to the world-wide teaching community.