Student Resources for General Chemistry

ChemPaths: Not an Online Textbook, A Student Portal

What is ChemPaths?

Each year instructors assign a textbook as required reading for their students. "Read sections 4.3-4.9 by Monday's Lecture." Lately, these instructions have expanded to become "Read sections 4.3-4.9 from your text, and look online at the following useful tutorials." And even further, now textbook authors are including a number of external resources either available online or on a CD included with the textbook purchase. ChemPaths is the Student Portal of the Chemical Education Digital Library (The ChemEd DL), and has been built to assist instructors in providing a means to bring all of these multimedia resources into one cohesive package ready for student-use. In short: your textbook, online tutorials and web-resources all in one package.

How do I use it? - Navigation

Along the left side of this screen should be a menu entitled "ChemPaths How-To" - if there isn't, then you should go back to the homepage (click "Home" at the top of this screen) and go select "How Do I Use This Site?" From the menu there.

The menu to the left of this screen outlines a series of webpages, tutorials or textbook pages which your instructor has gathered together for you. This series of pages put together is called a Pathway. Each course can have various numbers of pathways, and indeed this How-To tutorial is also a pathway.

At the bottom of your window is another gray menu. This has two rectangles: one on the left and one on the right. These links will take you to the previous page along the pathway, or the next page along the pathway, respectively. In the center of this bar is a link that says: "If you use any links within the text, this will take you back to...." As you would expect, this will take you back to the page you are currently viewing. This helps you to keep track of where you are in your assigned reading, while still making it easy for you to explore around and look at related items.

There are other menus available, as well. To the right you will see menus such as "Other approaches to this topic," "From your Textbook," or "From Elsewhere." Each of these pages contains links to other related items you may find interesting. Let's try out the navigation system. Recall that the link in the bottom-middle of this window will take you back to the text you are currently viewing. Try clicking on one of the links on the right-hand side of this page under "From Elsewhere" and then return to this page via the link in the bottom menu.

Did you make it? Are you back here now? Obviously you are... or you didn't leave... either way, once you feel comfortable with this, move on to the next step along this pathway by clicking on the blue boxed link in the bottom right corner of your screen entitled: "Using the Textbook".