Online tools for chemical education are widely used in the last decade. Several state of the art homework and test systems are available for chemistry online learning. Most of these applications are based on chemistry textbooks and uses well-curated questions created by professionals to help students to master a certain division of chemistry.
Our ultimate goal is to support online learning and help students practice and master chemistry and biochemistry. ChemAxon’s learning platform has a friendly and intuitive interface to easily create and share online learning materials. Tools like Marvin JS, BioEddie and JChemBase are used to automatically evaluate and grade student’s assignments.
ChemAxon provides an open cloud-based learning hub to enhance classroom collaboration and increase the effectiveness of learning. This online learning platform is a powerful tool to help teachers in coaching students based on progress tracking.
An application of ChemAxon's platform for education
1. An application of ChemAxon’s
platform for online education
Presenter: Erika Biró
2. ● Marvin tools for chemical
structure drawing
● Comparing chemical
structures
● Structure-based property
predictions for molecules
● Biomolecule drawing and
handling
ChemAxon tools in online education
Cheminformatics Software
Solution Provider for 20 years
3. Introducing Zosimos
The name, Zosimos refers to an ancient Egyptian chemist born in Panopolis, in the south of
Roman Egypt. He is known of writing the oldest known books on alchemy in Greek.
6. How to get more experienced with
drawing and naming “alcohols”? Crowdsourcing
The idea behind Zosimos learning
hub is content sharing.
HOW?
Let’s take a student just finishing her first
chemistry course on university. She’s keen
to learn more about drawing & naming
alcohols. She googles for more study.
She finds a study uploaded to
Zosimos - rated by 1000s of
students - and even teachers.
8. Today we learned about
stereochemistry. Please
complete the homework I
assigned to you by next
Monday!
Crowdsourcing
In an other example let’s take a
teacher, who teaches stereo-
chemistry for his students. He wants
to assign a homework for them - and
within 20 minutes on Zosimos he would
be able to find a study set, rated high by
other instructors.
He saved time by relying on
Zosimos’ resources.
10. Create your own study set!
www.zosimos.io
Save
Time
Hot!
Try it out!
11. Hot!
Try it out!
www.zosimos.io
Evaluate tests & homeworks
Automated evaluation saves time -
and what’s more, statistics on the
progress of students is collected and
visualized to the instructor. This helps
to prepare for the next lesson!
No more manual evaluationSave
Time
12. Equal
opportunities
Business model
-Either use it as a service, and leave
the IT problems to ChemAxon.
-Or governmental/educational bodies
can buy it to build their controlled
environment.
-We support any connection needed
(like D2L, Blackboard or Canvas).
Affordable solution
13. We provide a framework
Note! We do not provide the content -
that is coming from teachers and
students. Creators support equal
opportunities to give access to
knowledge regardless the
background.
Equal
opportunities Content publishing
14. Gamification
Emotion based
learning
Personalised
learning
Zosimos will tailor students’ practicing and learning based on
statistics and activity.
Will increase the involvement and motivation of a student
during the learning phase with playful solutions like the
onboarding with a tutorial, challenges or adding narrative.
During the evaluation phase students will get help to
receive proper feedback.
Our tools are already used in online education all around the world behind the scenes.
You can see here some of our tools which are already used in education, for example
Marvin JS to draw chemical structures.
JChem Base search engine to automatically evaluate student’s assignments.
We have tools like BioEddie and Biomolecule toolkit for handling macromolecules.
And now we have just started to develop a new initiative: a web application for online education called Zosimos
We named the new online learning framework about Zosimos. He was an Egyptian chemist who lived around the 4th century AD.
Zosimos was born in Panopolis, in the south of Roman Egypt. He is famous of writing the oldest known books on alchemy (in Greek language).
We would like to do this existing experiment not alone but with enthusiastic peers who enjoy experimenting with educational methods.
We encourage you to join our experiment as an Early Adopter!
The six building blocks of our educational vision with you:
Crowdsourcing and supporting Equal opportunities are the two most important goals.
Another key objective is to save time for both teachers and students with automated evaluation of homeworks and tests.
Furthermore, Gamification, Personalised learning and Emotion based learning are very challenging methods we would like to apply.
The idea behind Zosimos learning hub is the content sharing. So let’s see why and how we imagine to share the content?
Imagine that a student during the introductory general chemistry course of the first semester at a university is studying “alcohols” for the next lesson. She has just finished studying from her book but still not feeling confident enough about alcohols. She is googling for some exercise about drawing and naming “alcohols”.
She is getting a hit of a study set at Zosimos learning hub, uploaded by a teacher at a University of Tokyo, more than 1000 students already used it and rated it with five stars so she decides to use that study set to get more experienced with “alcohols”.
Another example: A teacher is giving a lecture to his students about introductory general chemistry in the first semester at a university. He is focusing on stereochemistry today. At the end of the lecture he is asking the students: We learnt about stereochemistry today, please do this homework I assigned to you by next Monday!
As a preparation the teacher spent 20 minutes on the day before the lesson to create a study set about stereochemistry and to assign the study set to his students.
Fortunately, he has found an impressive study set on the learning hub which was recommended and rated highly by other instructors.
He saved the time of creating a new study set, he reused a study set which was kindly published by another instructor.
Another advantage will be that by the next lecture he will have statistics about the progress of the students and will decide either to further investigate in studying Stereochemistry or to jump in a new topic.
We don’t think that reinventing the wheel is practical, instructors and students should rather share their learning or teaching material and good practices in a form of study set with the world. This way you can save a certain amount of time.
Sharing with the whole world: anyone can search, take a public study set as exercise and rate the shared study set based on the gained experience.
This is an evolution of content. Creating, sharing with the world, searching, trying out and rating. That’s what we call evolution in this case.
And of course
If you have creative ideas about how to learn or teach something,
If you have special requirements,
If you would like to create a secure test set,
you can create your own set!
As everyone, teachers are short of time so the basic requirement toward Zosimos is that it is able to evaluate tests and homeworks.
This feature is already developed so please have a look at our dedicated demo site ( www.zosimos.io ).
Furthermore, based on the automated evaluation the teacher can see the progress of the students and can focus on the improvement areas of the students.
Statistics is collected and will be visualised to the instructor so he can use this statistic when preparing for the next lesson.
Some detail about how we imagine to support “Equal opportunities”.
With our business model we keep the prices low, in some cases even free since we would like to support equal opportunities.
We will offer many possibilities for learning communities for example:
They either use it as a service which is operated by ChemAxon for a quick start and taking away the headache of software installation, updates, backups and operation.
Other option is that states, countries, universities might buy it as a web software. In this case the software can run within their controlled environment where any restrictions for educations can be applied and educational regulation can be fulfilled.
In both cases we will support the connection to existing systems to facilitate single sign-on and grade return to a third-party application (like IMS Global specific for Learning Tools Interoperability). For example we plan to implement an interface to connect to D2L, Blackboard, Canvas on demand.
We don’t give content, we just build a learning framework! The content will be provided by the teachers and students.
With this framework, every time when someone creates his own study set and decides to publish it, supports equal opportunities to made education easier available to more students.
When we say “Personalised Learning” we mean that the learner gets help from Zosimos. Zosimos tailors the practicing of the student based on the statistics of the student’s activity. Including gamification tools like onboarding with a tutorial, challenge and adding narrative will increase the student’s motivation during the learning phase, later during the evaluation phase Emotion based learning will help student to receive the proper feedback.
Imagine we have a virtual chemistry coach who is guiding the student based on the recent activity what to practice more.
The virtual chemistry coach is aware based on the student’s recent activity where he/she needs to improve and created a study set especially for him/her.
Here I would like to emphasize what is already implemented and what is still yet at vision level.
What you can already try out is:
creating study sets with exercises
publishing it if you would like and
you can do it as an exercise.
But don’t search for the virtual coach at our demo page, it was just a prototype, you won’t find him yet.
And if you liked it and would like to be peer in developing the remaining part please join us as Early Adopter!
I would like you to consider joining us as an Early Adopter if you like experimenting with educational methods.
Please find us at our demo site ( www.zosimos.io ) , or at Zosimos Learning on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/652842275078587/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13614568) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/ZosimosLearning).