An application of ChemAxon's platform for education

Editor's Notes

• #3: 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
• #4: 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).
• #5: 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!
• #6: 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.
• #7: 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”.
• #9: 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.
• #10: 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.
• #11: 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!
• #12: 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.
• #13: 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.
• #14: 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.
• #15: 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.
• #17: 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!
• #18: I would like you to consider joining us as an Early Adopter if you like experimenting with educational methods.
• #19: 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).