Teaching college chemistry in the time of COVID-19 pandemic: A personal account of teaching in the old normal vs. the new normal

The SARS CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2), cause of COVID-19 (CoronaVirus Disease 2019) has afflicted close to 10 million people all over the world resulting to almost half a million deaths. This disease is severely contagious and necessitates social or physical distancing between persons. As such, traditional face-to-face learning is not advised and teachers need to shift to online teaching. There are challenges to online teaching and learning for students, teachers, and the higher education institute, e.g. hardware, bandwidth, and software issues. These will be difficult but these can be overcome eventually. This work is a personal account of the old normal or traditional way of teaching Organic Chemistry and the transition to the new normal of teaching on-line. On-line teaching can be as effective as traditional teaching but everyone has to put in effort and participate in training to get used to this. In the end, it is the teacher’s being a true teacher that matters, that the teacher teaches to the best of his or her ability even during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic.