Interview with Christian Rojas, Professor of Chemistry

The current pandemic and #CovidCampus context that we now face happened quickly and is without precedent in terms of schools and universities needing to continue almost every aspect of their work online.  Please describe how you have navigated transitioning your courses, your pedagogical approach and your classroom/student community online. Please address both challenges and what has been working well for you and your students.

I'm teaching a large course this semester, Introductory Organic Chemistry, which has 150 students.  For that first week we went online, I made some video recordings corresponding to our Wednesday and Friday classes and I posted those for those for the students.  I already have a pretty extensive set of materials and problem-solving exercises that are online and I've continued to publish those on Canvas according to the usual schedule. And I did also have office hours that first week on Zoom, too.  I also have four TAs for the course who are continuing to hold their office hours through Zoom. 

Organic chemistry is a very visual thing where you have to draw out structures of molecules, and so I was able to use an iPad and Adobe illustrator and the share screen feature in Zoom to do that. With the help of one of my colleagues, Dr. Jean Vadakkan, in the Chemistry Department, I’ve converted some of my lecture notes into slides that I'll be able to share with the students. I think we'll talk through those slides and that will be the class format going forward.   

Please describe what pedagogical innovations you are working on or plan to create as part of instructional continuity with your students.  Feel free to point to helpful resources you have created (alone or with other faculty) and any other resources that you have found particularly positive and helpful to you and your students.

The changes have been made more or less by necessity. So, for instance, I had originally thought that I would be able to be in the classroom where we usually have class.  I thought we could set up a camera in there to essentially live stream what the normal class would be like. That’s not going to be possible just because access to campus is very limited. 

I've never been a big fan of PowerPoint presentations because especially in the subject that I teach, it's important that the pace be appropriate for students to at least have a good shot at assimilating the information as we go along.  That limits how readily people can take notes and everything - that's something that giving classes on a blackboard really helps to reinforce. I'm trying to be aware of that as we go to a more PowerPoint-ish type of type of approach. 

The office hours seem to be working reasonably well. They're fairly interactive though it takes longer to get through things than it does live, in person. Drawing things out on the iPad is slower than on a blackboard. 

In the last couple of years, I actually developed a lot of video materials for this online modular system that I use in class. And all those materials are already there, so that’s a good supplement. A few years ago, Barnard established something called the Committee on Online and On- Campus Learning (COOL). Melanie Hibbert and I and Liyang Li, a graduate student from Teachers College who was interested in online education, all worked together to set up these systems for my Organic Chemistry One and Organic Chemistry Two classes. It's fortuitous because a lot of those materials are already there and the students are used to the system. And at least that gives me an easy way to continue to give them problems to work on so that they can keep up the momentum of learning the material. And so hopefully that will be helpful. 

The other faculty and I definitely have been anecdotally sharing and keeping in touch about the different approaches that we're taking. I'm not teaching a laboratory class this semester but some people definitely are. They have been trying to come up with how you can have any sort of chemistry laboratory experience remotely. I think that's been a challenge for people.   

Could you share a couple of examples either of 1. Particularly interesting research that your students are working on and have been working on well since the move online and/or 2. Some insights/’pleasant surprises’ about your courses, your approach to teaching, your students and classroom dynamic that have emerged and are emerging.

In addition to teaching Organic Chemistry this semester, during this academic year, I also have three students who are completing their senior thesis research in my laboratory. The three of them had been scheduled to go to the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Philadelphia to present a poster on their work. Of course, that meeting was canceled but the ACS has created a forum where students can upload their posters or their presentations that creates a virtual environment, so that there will be some record of the fact that they did their poster and can share it. One of my research students is back in Germany now, which is where her home is. One of them is in Florida. And the other one is still in the New York City area. We’ve been going back and forth with their poster presentation, exchanging ideas and finalizing that. So that's been one way that we've managed to continue a little bit with research.  

Those three students are also still working on their written thesis document. I'm able to provide feedback remotely on that and then at the end of the semester, we usually have a series of senior thesis presentations. And so that will continue through Zoom. And I think still to be determined is whether we'll go ahead with what we usually do, namely a kind of a thesis defense format that's modeled after a PhD defense with a panel of faculty members that typically takes 45 minutes to an hour with the students themselves. Maybe we'll be able to continue with those, but as far as the actual research is concerned, Barnard and Columbia have asked all labs to cease operations, if at all possible, and that is possible in our case.  It remains to be determined what's going to happen with research over the summer. We usually have a very involved and productive research section during the summer for about 10 weeks starting toward the end of May and going through the end of July, so I guess it depends how everything plays out. 

Please feel free to add anything else that you would like to mention about your courses, your students, your ideas going forward for the rest of the semester.

I taught a First-Year seminar last semester called Periodic Tales of the Elements.  The seminar had to do with the fact that it was the international year of the periodic table last year, 2019. It wasn't a chemistry seminar per say, but it did have a lot of sort of chemistry-oriented things. But we also read a lot of poems: the idea of those seminars is that you read a lot of stuff and you write a lot. One of my students from that seminar sent me an article from The New Yorker by Dan Chiasson, an English professor from Wellesley College talking about the sense of loss of having a semester end so abruptly, that there's this natural rhythm and progression to the semester. He was talking about how the spring semester kind of tracks along with the arrival of spring. Everybody starts out in parkas, as he said, and by the end, everybody's in shorts. 

I think the article really kind of captures the way I feel about just having the semester go from one format into a completely different one. I think regardless of how well we handle it, something essential and vital is definitely lost in the translation. In a sense, I'm sad about that. But, you know, on the other hand, I think I and other faculty are going to do whatever we can to try to make the best of the situation. 

That definitely echoes what some other faculty are saying about sort of a sense of loss, that kind of mourning. And it seems it's important that that takes place alongside, ‘OK, we're going to keep things going, we're going to continue’ let's have some recognition that we’re living in a global catastrophe right now. And maybe we need to take some time with that, too. 

I completely agree. And you know, on the one hand, it's true. We should try to be clear that we're going to stick with this and we're going to make it through and in the end, things will work out. On the other hand, there is this other aspect of a sadness or a regret or a sense of something missing. I think that's also important, because otherwise people kind of feel like, ‘Am I the only one who's not ‘Rah rah - everything's going to just work out dandy?’ I think that's important. I think that's a necessary thing to acknowledge even as we carry on.