The Stone Arch Bridge Initiative for Education Resources, SABIER, is pleased to announce the launch of a Chemistry course for K-12. This is a course that uses a chemistry text from Libretexts and  is housed in a Moodle course with homework quizzes created by Andrew Lyman-Butler. Andrew described the quizzes and his thinking in a Medium article:

“Considerable variation in assessment items between students and between attempts. Numeric questions make use of Moodle’s “calculated” question type, in which random numbers within set limits are generated for each question, and student responses are evaluated using a teacher-supplied formula and a margin of error. Further variation is incorporated by using an item bank with multiple variants of each question type, which are sampled at random every time a new assessment attempt is generated. Two students sitting next to each other will have completely different quizzes, and a student re-attempting a quiz will have it regenerated from scratch.”

 This course is available for download from the SABIER. All components of the course are openly licensed so that teachers can modify any portion of the content or quizzes to meet the particular needs of their students. In addition to the quizzes that are aligned to each section of the content, there is a template for lab reports and a grading rubric for those reports. A forum will be available in each content section that allows each student to respond to a prompt and then reply to the posts of other students once they have made their posts. SABIER’s teacher professional development cohorts will explore various strategies for using both lab reports and forums. 

Please contact Dan McGuire (dan@sabier.org) to be included in the teacher professional development cohort and to receive instructions for downloading the Moodle course file. There are still slots available at no cost to teachers or their schools for the teacher professional development cohorts. Limited support is available to assist in importing the course into Canvas, Schoology, or D2L. We do not recommend using the course with Google Classroom except via a link to a free Moodle site. LTI functionality to LMSs other than Moodle will be available in 2020.