TEACHING GENERAL CHEMISTRY WITH INSTRUCTOR’S SCREEN SHARING: STUDENTS’ OPINIONS ABOUT THE IDEA AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION

Knowing students' opinions about instructor's screen sharing via various media is important for developing online science courses including chemistry. This study examined university students' opinions about the idea and the practice of instructor's screen sharing via websites on example of join.me, VoIP-applications on example of Skype, and multi-user 3D virtual environments on example of Second Life. It was conducted during summer course of General Chemistry at University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences in Eugene, USA, for two consecutive years, 2001 and 2012. The data were collected through an online 14-item 4-point Likert-type questionnaire and students' reviews. It was found that students have primarily positive opinions about screen sharing regardless of their gender, major, residence, and employment status. Join.me was found to be the most and Second Life to be the least favored media for screen sharing. Students with higher final grades provided more positive opinions.