A surprising number of titles are available for free download.
The Library of Congress has an extensive set of links to Chemstry titles arranged by catalog number, including numerous rare classics from the 19th Century and earlier.
California Institue of Technology offers online copies of many older chemistry titles by CalTech authors. Among these is Chemical Principles, 3rd edition by Dickerson, Gray, and Haight, described below.
[many more specific chemistry titles will be added to this list later in 2011]
General Chemistry
Chemical Principles, 3rd Ed (Richard Dickeson, Harry Gray and Gilbert Haight, 1979) - This 1979 text is well-regarded and still good for most first-year General Chemistry courses. Each chapter can be downloaded as a separate pdf file; to see which one you need, move your mouse over the image and the title will appear.
Chemical Principles (CK-12 foundation; Sharon Bewick, Johathan Edge, Therese Forsythe, Richard Parsons) A single 900-page, 51Mb pdf file; download.
Concept Development Studies in Chemistry (John S. Hutchinson, 2010) - originally published as a JCE LivText.
Inorganic and Applied Chemistry (Peter Hede, Søren Beier, 2007) Intended primarily for students in engineering and applied chemistry fields.
Physical Chemistry
Thermodynamics and Chemistry, 2nd Edition (Howard DeVoe, U of Maryland) - intended for a one-semester course in classical chemical thermodynamics.
Physical Chemstry (Walter Moore, 1970s?) A classic P. Chem book, available in multiple formats including Kindle, but layout similar to GoogleBooks.
Note: see the section that follows this one for MIT and Berkeley online lectures.
Welcome to Educational Vodcasting! - "This site is devoted to teaching educators how to use podcasts and vodcasts to increase student achievement. This is the brainchild of Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams who are pioneers in the field of using vodcasts in the classroom. They have devised a new method of teaching called Pre-Vodcasting. In this model, students watch vodcasts at home and class time is spent in engaging hands-on activities and directed problem solving."
Chemistry Screencasts is a collection of mini-lectures on various chemistry topics with pictures and sound by Mark Ott of Jackson (MI) Community College — an interesting example of online multimedia in chemistry education. You have a choice of first-semester and second-semester topics.
Michelle Francl of Bryn Mawr College has prepared an extensive set of blogs, webcasts and podcasts. Some of these support first- and second year courses, others are for a wider, non-technical audience. All are thoughtful and engaging examples of ways to make Chemistry more interesting, and of how non-traditional media can be incorporated into a course. Some of the more interesting collections include Culture of Chemistry: The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry, and Chemistry 104 Lecture summaries
Distance Education Clearinghouse website at the University of Wisconsin offers articles, bibliographies, conferences, distance education web links and many additional resources.
MIT Principles of Chemical Science - Fall 2008 - This MIT OpenCourseWare course provides an introduction to the chemistry of biological, inorganic, and organic molecules. The emphasis is on basic principles of atomic and molecular electronic structure, thermodynamics, acid-base and redox equilibria, chemical kinetics, and catalysis.
UC - Berkeley offers online video and audio lectures for many of its courses, including first-year General Chemistry: Unfortunately, these are not indexed by topic. Some of the series currently available:
Chem1A: Spring 2011 (Heino Nitsche, Chunmai Li) - Fall 2010 (Angelica Stacy)
Chem1B: Spring 2004 (Kubinec) (Nothing more recent is apparently available)
CMU on-line Chemistry course - as part of an "Open Learning Initiative", Carnegie Mellon University offers what appears to be a demonstration course on chemical stoichiometry that illustrates several innovative approaches, including a simulation-based Virtual Laboratory. The "open and free" version is available to anyone; an Academic Version is also available that can be used in connection with existing courses.
Online Chemistry & Lab Courses - Oregon State U. now offers "Ecourses" in General-, Organic-, and Inorganic Chemistry.
MIT Kitchen Chemistry course - This course, given in 2006 by Patricia Christie, was designed to be an experimental and hands-on approach to applied chemistry (as seen in cooking). The materials are available by download.
ChemWiki - This site (at UC-Davis) offers an Open Textbook environment for topics beyond General Chemistry, such as physical, inorganic, and analytical chemistry.
Alkali metals in water - Demonstrates the reactions of Li, Na, K, Rb and Cs with water - UTube ****
Explosive Chemical Reaction: Potassium metal and Bromine - UTube *
Bromine and alcohol - "Here's an example of what happens when you mix BROMINE and alcohol." ***
Chemistry Video Tutorials - A large collection of short YouTube videos on Chemistry topics by high school teacher Mark Rosengarten. (This link leads to a YouTube piece on voltaic cells; to see the complete list, click on "Accelerated/Enriched Chmistry" in the right-hand panel.)
Chemistry Lecture DVDs - this commercial site offers video DVD's containing an entire year of lectures for courses in high-school and AP chemistry. Individual lecture video podcasts (MP4 format) are also available.
Free Online Stoichiometry Course from the Carnegie Mallon ChemCollective
Contemporary Chemistry Multimedia Project - This site has a large collection animations, some quite good. In its present state, navigation is a bit awkward, and I consider it more useful as a source of ideas and links than as something for students to go through on their own.
Food Science videos by Kirsten Sanford - "Sometimes the art of cooking isn’t an art at all, it’s all about science." a nice collection of short videos, many of chemical interest.
Frostbite Theater - a collection of science videos relating to liquid nitrogen and electrostatics produced by Jefferson Lab, a U.S. Dept of Energy facility.
Glassware and Apparatus Videos - show students the best way to assemble glass jointware. A variety of different examples are provided, with variations that demonstrate some of the more complicated assemblies that are often used in inorganic synthesis. Includes reflux, vacuum distillation, various three-necked flasks setups. This is one component of the VIPEr project for inorganic chemistry education.
101science.com - Chemistry - This page of hodge-podge contains a "comprehensive list of free chemistry videos" about 1/10 of the way down.
The Khan Academy is a remarkable and ambitious non-commercial undertaking that offers over 1600 free Science-related videos (via YouTube), including a sizeable number devoted to Chemistry. The videos I have looked at are basically animated blackboard talks. The talks themselves are exceptionally well presented, and amount to short mini-lectures that can be quite effective.
Chemistry Screencasts is a collection of mini-lectures on various chemistry topics with pictures and sound by Mark Ott of Jackson (MI) Community College. You have a choice of first-semester and second-semester topics.
Molecular Movies - "A portal for cell and molecular animation" - these excellent videos include organic reaction mechanisms, solids and polymerizations.
Organic Chemistry Reaction Mechanisms and Stereochemistry - This rather crudely-constructed Web site from Massey U. (New Zealand) currently offers eight videos on such topics as nucleophilic and electrophilic substitutions, the aldo reactions and the Claisen reaction.
Organic Chemistry Music Video "Resistant to Base" - "An organic chemistry-themed music video parodying Robert Palmer's 1985 "Addicted to Love." *
Shakhashiri Video DVD - Contains 49 of Bassam Shakhashiri's well known chemical demonstration videos.
SciTalks - Chemistry-related video lectures (many of them Nobel lectures).
SlideShare - the Chemistry section of a site at which users can upload and download slides.
The Periodic Table of Videos - click on an element, and watch a two-minute video from U. of Nottingham that describes the element and its uses.
Thermite - applied to an old car, and to liquid nitrogen ****
"Water-as-fuel" - "Stan Meyer developed a water "splitter" that separates hydrogen from oxygen, and burns the hydrogen as fuel in an internal combustion engine." Sure!
PhET Interactive Science Simulations - This NSF-sponsored site at U Colorado Boulder serves as a clearinghouse for simulation programs and solicits contributions from developers. A fair number of Chemistry simulations are availble for download. A paper describing the PhET project appeared in the Fall 2010 CCCE Newsletter.
Java and JavaScript materials for course support
- Kinetic-molecular gas simulation - a rather nice one by F-K Hwang of National Taiwan Normal U.
- Chemistry Experiments and Exercises (David Blauch, Davidson U) includes applets representing chemical equipment (for use in Web pages), as well as other applets covering a wide range of topics. They can be downloaded as a combined .zip file.
- Physical Chemistry Animations - a large collection of animations covering many areas of General and Physical Chemistry, collected and organized by Rob Schurko (U Windsor, Canada)
- DivGraph is a JavaScript program under development by Robert Hanson at St. Olaf College. It can be plugged into any web page to provide real-time graphing capability, or it can be called with a function or x,y data and information for a quick graph in a new window. Numerous examples of scripts are available, as is a lesson on Q/K.
- Bob Hanson of St. Olaf college has assembled a collection of JavaScript-based exercise and simulators for General Chemistry.
Information for developers
Harry Pence has prepared a series of tutorials on the use of multimedia that offer some guidelines and provide useful information on the design of presentation software and materials. One of these, discussing color blindness, should be of particular interest to those who use color in their presentations.
How to write Web-based computer-assisted test/homework questions using Perl, CGI, HTML, etc. Carl David of the University of Connecticut has developed a system for using the Web as a medium for distributing homework problems, and for submitting and checking the answers. More recently, he has assembled a Web-based tutorial covering the fundamentals of HTML and Perl programming for others who would like to implement such a system. This an excellent starting point for newcomers to CGI programming.
MathType is a an equation editing utility for producing equations for display in Web documents. (I use the Mac version and can recommend it.)
MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation for encoding mathematical content on the web.
Chemical Markup Language (derived from SGML and implemented in JAVA) is a scheme for including molecular information in HTML documents.
MS-Word macros for Chemistry - a large collection of useful macros by Robert Grossman, U. Kentucky.
Concept Mapping
IHMC CmapTools - this free open-source software was developed by a group at U. of West Florida and is available for Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux, and Solaris platforms. The home page is itself a concept map; other pages are accessed by clicking on the icons under each map entry. For an example of its use in Chemistry, see the concept maps at the end of each section of my Atoms and the Periodic Table site.
PIViT (Project Integration Visualization Tool) was developed by the U Mich-based Project-Based Science group and is available as freeware for Macintosh and Windows.
C-TOOLS: Concept-Connector Tools for Online Learning in Science - A Java-based, on-line tool to enable students in large introductory science classes at the university level to visualize their thinking online and receive immediate formative feedback. Project site; more informative description.
Computer-assisted instruction
CAI as a medium for mainline instruction (S.K. Lower)
A Learner-Centered Approach to Multimedia Explanations: Deriving Instructional Design Principles from Cognitive Theory This article by Roxana Moreno and Richard Mayer sets out some of the theory relating to multimedia instruction, and describes an application to science teaching.
Hot Potatoes - a free suite of six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Free to academic and non-commercial users.