A Workshop on the Prospects of the Development of the Chemistry Curriculum in Al-Andalus University Faculties
Under the auspices of Prof. Dr. Mohammed Amer Al-Mardini, University President, and as part of the activities of the Basic Sciences Development Program at Al-Andalus University, a workshop was held on Saturday 19-11-2022 at the Scientific Research Committee to develop the chemistry curriculum in the university faculties.
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Yahya Mualla, Chairman of the Scientific Accreditation Committee, opened the activites of the workshop with a speech in which he welcomed the attendees, and referred to the positive feedback on the Basic Sciences Development workshops at the national level, and the importance of developing the basic sciences curricula, including chemistry, in line with world-leading universities. Chemistry is taught in Al-Andalus University in five out of six faculties with the aim of obtaining external accreditation from the German ACQUIN Foundation.
Then Prof. Dr. Muhammed Amer Al-Mardini, University President, spoke about the importance of basic sciences, which form the basis for clinical sciences, with the need to take into account the scientific orientation of each faculty and in accordance with accreditation purposes. Then he gave some guidelines regarding the need for the members of each workshop to take into account the course description of subsequent years, and the need to take more course content from an international university when comparing with the contents of our courses.
Then Dr. Abd Al-Naser Harfoush, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, noted the importance of the program for developing basic sciences curricula, which will be a compass for all clinical courses to obtain accreditation later.
The following chemistry instructors at the university presented the chemistry courses: Prof. Dr. Abd Al-Latif Youssef, Prof. Dr. Abd Al-Rahman Roumieh, Prof. Dr. Rafiq Al-Qusini, Prof. Dr. Yasser Moussa, Prof. Dr. Mohamed Nasser, Prof. Dr. Samira Suleiman, Dr. Warda Khalil, Dr. Nisreen Aldo, Dr. Hadeel Mossalem, and Dr. Ibrahim Muhammad. Each presented material in accordance with the faculty in which they teach. A detailed explanation was made of the course content of chemistry in the various faculties of the university and its importance as a base upon which many clinical sciences are built in the subsequent academic years, and the instructors compared these contents with their counterparts in a group of world leading universities (German, Czech, and Italian) in addition to their teaching methodologies. They also indicated that our curricula correspond to a large extent with the curricula of the world leading universities, and they also reviewed the modern international references that are relied upon in teaching chemistry courses, and the prestigious scientific journals with a high impact factor that tackle our chemistry curricula contents.
An extensive discussion took place on the course contents of chemistry courses at Al-Andalus University and similar ones in international universities. Points of similarity that ranged between 80-90% were reviewed aa well as points of difference and ways to develop the chemistry curriculum at Al-Andalus University and the method of teaching it to keep pace with what is taught in world leading universities.
