Greetings, OER and OpenEd friends! This week we’d like to introduce you to LibreTexts team member Bob Belford.
Dr. Belford is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, former chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Education’s Committee on Computers in Chemical Education, and a Fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). He is the IUPAC Task Group Chair for the InChI OER (International Chemical Identifier Open Education Resource), an OER on the use of the INCHI semantic identifier. He is also the project lead for Reaxys Education, an OER on Elsevier’s Reaxys chemical information portal. Belford was lead-PI on the NSF funded Cheminformatics OLCC, an intercollegiate course taught on 14 campuses that was designed to introduce modern cheminformatics into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, and all the content developed through the OLCC has been ported to the LibreText hyperlibrary. Belford is currently developing an Internet of Chemistry Things OER (IoCT OER), and after it has been properly vetted and curated, will transfer the IoCT OER content to the LibreText hyperlibrary. Belford uses LibreText in his general chemistry classes where he has created over 100 original videos, and has pioneered the use and integration of the Hypothes.is social annotation system into classroom activities. Through Hypothes.is, Belford’s students can not only discuss any passage within his LibreTexts, but his students can highlight, annotate and directly link external web content to the relevant sections of his chapters, extending the discussions within his Libretext to content across the web. Belford’s research interests deal with how cheminformatics is changing the fundamental cognitive artifacts used to represent, manipulate and communicate chemical information, and how these, combined with advanced social and semantic web informatics, can impact the practice of science and student learning.
Get in touch with Dr. Belford here.
