The evolving nature of chemical education: challenges and opportunities.

Remember education in chemistry 20 years in the past, then imagine that education 20 years in the future. Two decades ago the internet did not exist and education was intended for everyone in the USA [1]. The library with its books, journals and documents was available for the user to obtain unknown information. To transfer information, the only storage device available was a photocopier or, perhaps, a note card onto which you wrote needed data. Undergraduate education at colleges and universities depended on information transfer in a classroom and the course sequence was prescribed in the USA with general chemistry preceding organic chemistry, which in turn preceded physical chemistry with analytical, biological and inorganic chemistries interwoven into a basic text-dependent framework [2]; similar regimentation was employed elsewhere [3]. Laboratories relied on sensory ‘change’ whether it was the color of an indicator in a titration, the heat generated when two substances were mixed or the odor from a product formed in a chemical reaction, and instrumentation was sometimes available for pattern recognition associated with chemical properties [4].