Article
Kevin Ahern*
Teaching Biochemistry Online at Oregon
State University
From the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Oregon State
University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331
Abstract
A strategy for growing online biochemistry courses is pre-
sented based on successes in ecampus at Oregon State
University. Four free drawing cards were key to the effort—
YouTube videos, iTunes U online free course content, an
Keywords: online education; Oregon State University; YouTube;
iTunes U; student recruiting; biochemistry free and easy; OER;
metabolic melodies
Introduction
This article describes three novel online courses of bio-
chemistry I have created at Oregon State University. They
are BB 350 (Elementary Biochemistry), BB 450/550 (Gen-
eral Biochemistry I), and BB 451/551 (General Biochemistry
II) and they are offered every term of OSU’s four-term aca-
demic year (quarter system) along with one classroom ver-
sion of each. The courses have been offered for about 10
years online and about 15 years in the classroom. Similar
online courses are offered through MIT’s Open Courseware
[1], University of New England [2], Harvard [3], UC Berke-
ley [4], Michigan State University [5], Penn State University
[6], and others. Each of these varies in their approach, but
only the three courses described here provide 1) online
video lectures; 2) free downloadable textbook for use in the
course; 3); creative materials aimed at keeping students
engaged in and interested in course materials 4) a paired
set of free online iTunes U courses for students to try out
first, and 5) a funding model rewarding creation and suc-
cess of such courses. Such a comprehensive approach has
significant advantages in the recruitment of students,
Volume 00, Number 00, Month/Month 2016, Pages 00–00
*Address for correspondence to: Department of Biochemistry &
Biophysics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331.
E-mail: ahernk@orst.edu.
Received 30 December 2015; Revised 6 March 2016; Accepted 3 April
2016
DOI 10.1002/bmb.20979
Published online 00 Month 2016 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com)
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
Open Educational Resource textbook—Biochemistry Free
and Easy, and a fun set of educational songs known as the
Metabolic Melodies. VC 2016 by The International Union of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 00:000–000, 2016.
course improvement, and accomplishment of learning
objectives.
Course Descriptions
BB 350—A four credit course aimed at covering the entire
subject of biochemistry in a single 10 week course. Stu-
dents who take BB 350 are largely students interested in
becoming dieticians or pursuing careers in nutrition, food
science, physician assistant, nurse practitioner or, in some
cases pharmacy.
BB 450/550—The first half of a two-term series that
covers the same material as BB 350, but in more depth. BB
450/550 is a four credit course that can be taken for under-
graduate credit. Students registering for this two term
series have majors in the biological sciences, but not bio-
chemistry itself, as those students take a different series.
BB 451/551—The second half of the two-term series
described above. In the biological sciences, majors taking
this series are microbiology, biology, bioengineering, and
animal sciences. Students taking BB 450/550 and BB 451/
551 typically are pursuing careers in research, medicine,
dentistry, pharmacy, and veterinary medicine.
The roots of the design for these online courses began
in 2001, when I began videotaping and offering streaming
videos of lectures for students in the BB 450/550 and 451/
551 classes, followed later by BB 350. The video lectures
were popular with students in the classroom and OSU
ecampus inquired about offering at least one of the courses
online. They supplied about $3,000 of development money
to help bring it to fruition. Since the course materials (vid-
eos) were already in hand, the amount of funding was
1
 Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology Education

URLS for BB 350, BB 450/550, and BB 451/551 courses

TABLE I

BB 350 online http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb350/350material/schedule350f15.html

BB 350 classroom http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb350/350material/schedule350spring15c.html
BB 450/550 online http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb450/450material/schedule450f15.html
BB 450/550 classroom http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb450/fall14/schedule450f14c.html
BB 451/551 online http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb451/451material/schedule451f15.html
BB 451/551 classroom http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb451/winter14/schedule451w14.html

adequate for conversion to a simple online format. Full
development from scratch must include consideration of
video expense and will add significantly to the cost, as will
increasing the amount of engagement of students in the
courses.
To my surprise, with very little publicity and only about
a 2-week lead time, five students signed up for my BB 451/
551 online course. The surprise was rooted in a bit of
naivete and a fact of life for many online courses, especially
new ones—the majority of students taking the course that
term were not scattered all over the globe, but rather stu-
dents at Oregon State University who were taking it online
for 1) convenience or 2) because it was cheaper.
Funding Model
The funding model at OSU for ecampus is a bit unusual.
Out-of-state students find it is often less expensive for them
to register for an online course than to take a classroom
version of the same course. Another unusual aspect of our
funding model is that a good percentage of the tuition gen-
erated by ecampus comes directly back to the department,
bypassing the central administration and the Dean’s office,
though the latter has begun “taxing” departments on the
ecampus revenues. With this funding scheme, departments
and, by extension, instructors have financial incentives to
create and grow ecampus offerings.
Design Strategy
The design of each of the online courses is basically the
same. It starts with all of the learning resources provided
to classroom students—videos, notes, figures, help videos,
review sessions, and lecture highlight summaries. URLs for
the content for each of the classroom and ecampus ver-
sions of the courses is shown in Table I. Classroom students
access all of the content online, so ecampus students are,
in fact having that experience exactly the same. Two places
where differences exist are in face-to-face office hours and
in BB 450/550, where an in-person recitation for interac-
tion is replaced by videos of me solving problems online.
The inflexibility of learning management software can
be problematic and restrictive in some cases, particularly
video. We currently use Canvas and previously used Black-
board. Blackboard was unable to handle the video content
(the manager of Blackboard, in fact, requested that I not
put videos there lest it clog up the system to the point of
being unusable), so those had to be exported out another
location. The rest of the classroom course content is organ-
ized in an HTML-formatted table of dates corresponding to
each lecture with hyperlinks to content that includes fig-
ures, videos, highlights, problems, and other material. That
organization also does not translate easily to either Black-
board or Canvas. A learning management system is, how-
ever, required for all online courses at OSU, since its ability
to manage exams is essential. Thus, I could not avoid
online learning management systems completely, as I do
with my classroom course. Fortunately, I was able to nego-
tiate an agreement with ecampus that students in my
online courses could log-in to the learning management
system and get to a link that would point them out to
HTML-formatted Web pages where all content is linked,
but they would have to take exams in the learning manage-
ment system.
The focus of the courses is largely lecture-based so as
to mirror the delivery method of the classroom course.
There are considerations to be given to active, problem-
based learning that have not been addressed in the design
of these courses. There are two reasons for this—expense
and class size. Fully interactive course content requires a
significant investment in teaching assistants that is beyond
the budget available for teaching these courses. This is par-
ticularly a consideration, since the class sizes are very
large—BB 450/550 has 4001 students in a single lecture
hall (largest upper division class at OSU) and BB 451/551
typically has about 350 students. Since the ecampus
courses were patterned after the classroom courses, they
too do not have interactivity of students in the courses as
delivered. To address this limitation, a group of us are in

2 Teaching Biochemistry Online

the midst of designing self-paced, self-guided online learn-
ing modules that will allow for greater student involvement
with the material for both the classroom and the ecampus
courses. We expect to roll these out in the 2016–2017
school year and they will be open educational resources
available to everyone.
Content
After each of the classroom course lectures, I upload a
video of the lecture to YouTube, write and post on the class
Web page highlights of what was said, and post the lyrics to
a new biochemistry song that I sing at the end of each lec-
ture (see below). Students in the classroom course can see
and hear everything from the lecture within 24 hours of it
and have access to all of the figures, as well. Students in
the online courses see the course materials from the previ-
ous year so they do not have to wait for each video to be
processed. Since lectures come from an outline hyperlinked
to relevant figures contained in the online page described
above, students have easy access to all materials at the click
of a button. Students are encouraged to print the figures
and bring to them class (or before starting to watch the vid-
eos) so as to listen to lectures and not be copying figures
during them. All of this translates easily online. In fact,
there may be a slight advantage for online students because
on the first day of the term, they get access to all of the lec-
tures for the entire term, whereas the classroom students
have to wait as each lecture unfurls during the term.
Technical Considerations
The operation requires a bit of technical expertise, but
could be mastered with a day or so of training. I am not an
HTML coder, so I use Dreamweaver simply as an editor to
write the code necessary for posting material on the Web.
Video is a bit more techie. A Canon HD (1080p) digital
video camera is used to videotape the lectures. It is pointed
at the projection screen and left in that position for the
entire lecture, so no operator is required—again, limited
budget resources. I wear a wireless microphone that feeds
into the video camera, so sound quality is good. At the end
of a lecture, the raw video must be processed before
uploading to YouTube. This includes editing, as appropri-
ate, and saving in a format required by YouTube. Final Cut
Pro [7] and iSkySoft Video Converter [8] (on a Mac) have
been useful for this operation. iSkySoft is much easier to
learn to use and, for simple editing and conversion, it is
more than adequate for the task. Final Cut Pro, on the
other hand performs much better at technical editing, but
has a steeper learning curve. Video quality is important. It
should be at least HD and 1080p is becoming a minimum
standard. The 4K and 5K cameras are coming down in
price and will be the next digital advance on YouTube.
Processed 1080p videos for YouTube average about 7–8 Gb
Ahern
Four drawing cards for attracting students to
FIG 1 online courses. Each drawing card contains refer-
ences to the other cards and to registration infor-
mation for the online courses. [Color figure can
be viewed in the online issue, which is available
at wileyonlinelibrary.com.]
per 50 minute video, which on a fast Internet connection
can take 10–20 minutes to upload. To use YouTube, users
need to open an account (free) and to be able to upload vid-
eos longer than the 15 minute default time given for new
accounts to post an entire lecture.
Online Access
In the beginning, the students who registered for these
courses were primarily students from Oregon State
University. For ecampus offerings to be successful, informa-
tion about the courses needed to reach a much larger audi-
ence than just OSU students. With no advertising budget, it
was important to find free online ways of spreading the
word. If student awareness of a course does not stretch
beyond one’s campus borders, it will only grow as a fast as
the university does. These courses expanded because of four
“drawing cards” (Fig. 1). Two of these require no money and
little effort and provide free advertising on a daily basis.
They are YouTube and iTunes U. iTunes U is an underutil-
ized resource for providing free online instruction provided
through Apple’s iTunes platform. Instructors use intuitive
online tools to organize and provide content to free subscrib-
ers. All of the content of these courses is on iTunes U (BB
450/550 and BB 451/551 are combined into a single course)
so students can take the courses for a “test drive” to see how
they do. The potential audience of students for a free iTunes
U course is in the millions. They can take practice exams to
evaluate their performance before registering and paying for
the real thing. At present, over 35,000 students are
registered for my courses on iTunes U.
3

The other two drawing cards required more effort and cre-
ativity—an online open educational resource book I co-wrote
and a collection of over 100 songs about biochemistry called
Metabolic Melodies [9]. Both the book and all of the songs are
provided free online to anyone wanting to download them.
Youtube
YouTube’s system is simple to use and, more importantly, it
is the “go to” location for students seeking instructional
videos. For “getting the word out,” there is nothing to con-
sider but to use YouTube. YouTube was the second choice
for these courses, which originally were uploaded onto a
proprietary offsite system subscribed to by OSU. In contrast
to YouTube, OSU’s offsite facility was password protected
and the only people who even knew of the videos on it were
OSU students. When I uploaded my first videos to YouTube,
within minutes of uploading, 20 people had watched them.
Subsequently, I uploaded my entire catalog of videos to
YouTube and have continued doing that with every lecture
since. Presently, I have over 500 full video lectures on
YouTube that have been watched over 3.3 million times.
Every video carries information about how to register for the
online version of the course for which the lecture was given.
When that happened, registration of non-OSU students for
the courses began to rise rapidly and word of the courses
spread among student social networks. With the revenue
sharing of ecampus tuition revenues mentioned earlier, my
department received over $400,000 last year from my
ecampus courses.
Biochemistry Free and Easy
The concepts in biochemistry can be difficult to grasp and
while student exploration of them is important, it is equally
important to provide clear explanations of the phenomena
so deeper meanings can be explored and understood. It
was with that goal in mind, that I co-authored a biochemis-
try book entitled “Biochemistry Free and Easy” with my
wife and fellow biochemist, Indira Rajagopal [10]. We
aimed to create a textbook-formatted resource that would
avoid unnecessary technical details and focus on clear
explanations as I have strived to do in my lectures. We
released the book as an Open Educational Resource (OER)
in 2012 and, as of February, 2015, it has been downloaded
over 160,000 times by students all over the world. It is the
primary text for the BB 350 classroom and online courses.
It is also used as a supplemental text for BB 450/550 and
BB 451/551. Recognizing the value of using an OER to
teach a class, we are currently working on a new OER text-
book (to be called Biochemistry Free for All) that will be
appropriate as the main text for use by higher level
courses, such as BB 450/550 and BB 451/551 when it is
released in the summer of 2016.
4 Teaching Biochemistry Online
Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology Education
Approachability
Another consideration that has been central to the philoso-
phy of my teaching, both for classroom and online courses,
is that of lowering barriers to learning. A big obstacle to
learning is when students tell themselves the subject of bio-
chemistry will be hard to learn before they ever register for
the course. The message may come from their own experi-
ences or often from stories of urban legends, friends, or
family. It is particularly a problem for non-majors of bio-
chemistry, such as all of the students in my classes. Conse-
quently, I work to make students comfortable with the sub-
ject before I do anything in a course. Students are told that
whenever I am in my office, I am available. They do not
need to make an appointment. I keep at least 20–25 office
hours per week so that students can interact with me one
on one. Further I give all students my cell phone number
and tell them they are welcome to call me anytime, includ-
ing in the middle of the night, though I point out that I usu-
ally turn my phone off at night. This number is also
included on my YouTube videos for my online students.
Metabolic Melodies
Another approach is to make biochemistry fun. Toward this
end, I created the Metabolic Melodies, a collection of songs
about biochemistry a la Weird Al Yankovic. Over 40 have
been published in BAMBED [11–21]. At the end of each lec-
ture, I sing a song about the subject I have been discussing
and encourage students to join me. With over 100 songs
about biochemistry, I have more than enough music to cover
every topic I discuss in class, so I sing one of the songs at the
end of each class to emphasize in a novel way the points I
have made. I have had some great teaching moments, but
there is no experience that is quite as electric as getting 400
students to stand and sing their hearts out about ribosomes.
OSU Support
People frequently ask if the OSU administration or anyone
at OSU had concerns or presented obstacles with the
approach I took to my online courses. The answer is an
emphatic “no.” In fact, OSU supported moving to YouTube,
even though it was different from the video system they
had chosen to use on campus. OSU has opened up a chan-
nel on YouTube to host some of the videos and the OSU
Press agreed to publish Biochemistry Free for All when it is
completed later in 2016.
Assessment
Assessment of the effectiveness of ecampus classes poses
challenges. Many of the students who take these online
classes have previously been unsuccessful in biochemistry
at another institution and sign up because they have to
 Average exam scores for BB 350, BB 450/55/, and BB 451/551 courses since 2005
TABLE II

Course number Avg. exam 1 Avg. exam 2 Avg. exam 3 Avg. final

BB 350 online 66.1 6 5.6 69.0 6 4.4 66.0 6 6.0 66.3 6 5.2
BB 350 classroom 63.2 6 6.2 65.8 6 6.2 64.9 6 3.7 63.0 6 5.1
a
BB 450/550 online 58.0 6 5.1 62.9 6 4.7 60.5 6 4.9
a
BB 450/550 classroom 64.2 6 7.2 66.9 6 5.8 57.8 6 6.0
a
BB 451/551 online 64.9 6 6.3 65.2 6 6.8 64.8 6 6.4
a
BB 451/551 classroom 72.6 6 4.7 71.5 6 3.0 67.6 6 3.5

a
Only two midterms and a final are given in BB 450/550 and BB 451/551.

pass it in order to go to the next step in their academic pro- backward from that of the exam averages, though again,
grams. Other students who take the class are tremendously the error bars of each overlapped. In summary, with the
interested in the subject and have been pursuing it after videos and carefully constructed HTML-formatted content,
watching the YouTube video lectures. They are motivated, these online courses mimic their classroom equivalent very
passionate, and eager to learn. It is not uncommon to see a closely and exam score performance and student evalua-
pronounced bimodal distribution of grades in these tions ratings for these online and classroom courses sug-
courses. Finding a good control group for assessment pur- gest students in the online courses are receiving quality
poses is difficult and complicated by the fact that the online instruction with reasonable learning outcomes and they are
students and classroom students take different formats of satisfied with that.
exams—computer graded multiple choice for online stu-
dents and short answer/problem solving for those in the
classroom. With these limitations in mind, I have evaluated Discussion
the effectiveness of the online courses compared with class- Making a successful ecampus course requires effort to cre-
room courses with two comparisons—student performance ate an environment that encourages and facilitates learning
(online versus classroom) and student satisfaction (online for online students equaling that of their classroom peers.
vs. classroom). The assumptions of the assessment methods Budget constraints have limited my ability to provide inter-
have significant limitations so information presented here active, inquiry-based learning approaches in delivering
should be viewed from a qualitative perspective rather both classroom and ecampus versions of the courses and
than a quantitative one. consequently were not part of the design here. Next gener-
Table II compares average exam scores for students in ation courses will, in fact, include interactive online
the BB 350, 450/550, and 451/551 courses for online and
classroom students over the past 10 years. The averages
for students taking the online 350 course had higher aver- Comparison of student evaluation scores for BB
ages for all exams than students taking the classroom ver- TABLE III 350, BB 450/550, and BB 451/551 for the course
sion of the same course, whereas exam averages for BB and for the instructor
450/550 and 451/551 were generally lower for the online
version than for the classroom version. The error bars for
Course number Course eSET Instructor eSET
all of the exams in all of the courses overlap.
Table III shows a comparison of the electronic Student BB 350 online 4.68 6 0.32 5.03 6 0.38
Evaluation of Teaching (SET) scores for the instructor and
the course for each of the online and classroom versions of BB 350 classroom 5.03 6 0.05 5.68 6 0.21
the courses since we began using this system in 2011. BB 450/550 online 4.81 6 0.30 5.28 6 0.35
Average SET scores from students in the online BB 450/550
BB 450/550 classroom 4.80 6 0.20 5.37 6 0.06
and 451/551 were very similar or slightly higher than those
of students in the classroom versions of those courses, BB 451/551 online 4.81 6 0.45 5.19 6 0.48
whereas the SET scores for online BB 350 courses were
BB 451/551 classroom 4.65 6 0.07 5.15 6 0.07
lower than corresponding classroom versions. This result is

Ahern 5

modules currently being created that will be open access
and freely available to anyone hoping to use them. The
model described here, with the exception of creating Meta-
bolic Melodies, is one that can readily be applied at any
university or smaller school for any course series and the
Metabolic Melodies are free for anyone who wants to use
them for a biochemistry course. Since the computationally
heavy videos are hosted offsite at YouTube, significant
computing infrastructure is not required for this approach.
Neither is a learning management system a requirement,
since the classroom versions of these courses are offered in
their entirety without a learning management system. For
an online course, though exam administration adds
another level of complexity and for that, a learning man-
agement system will be of assistance. Technical skills
required of the instructor are minimal. Ideally, an instruc-
tor will be able to use an HTML editor and basic video edit-
ing software, but these functions can be performed by tech-
nical people, if desired. Exams are administered (typically)
through a learning management system and transfer cred-
its are the responsibility of the students’ home institutions.
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6 Teaching Biochemistry Online
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