Meet Dr. Jonathon Moir, Senior Program Manager of the Green Chemistry Teaching and Learning Community (GCTLC) at Beyond Benign. With a passion for chemistry education and advancing sustainability, Jonathon has been a champion of green chemistry throughout his career. From helping to found the Green Chemistry Initiative at the University of Toronto to guiding the development of the GCTLC, Jonathon’s journey is all about driving collaboration and innovation in the field.
As he leads the charge in shaping the GCTLC, Jonathon is excited to see the platform grow into a dynamic hub for educators, students, and industry leaders to unite, share resources, and push green chemistry education to new heights. Beyond Benign recently caught up with Jonathon to learn about his career journey, his vision for the GCTLC, and how this dynamic platform fosters green chemistry resource sharing and collaboration. Dive into the conversation below!
First, we’d love to hear about your career journey and the passions that have driven you! How did your professional path lead you to your current role with Beyond Benign, specifically working on the Green Chemistry Teaching and Learning Community (GCTLC)?
In graduate school during my Ph.D. program, I was fortunate to have some phenomenal colleagues in the same research group. In 2012, while in the office, two of my colleagues began talking about green chemistry and how great it would be to bring more of it into our chemistry department. Many of us agreed and felt that a student group could be a great way to start getting people on board. We got together for our first meeting with a few other friends and students from other research groups, began considering ideas for initiatives we could do, established a group constitution, and shortly after became an officially recognized group on campus: the University of Toronto Green Chemistry Initiative. It’s amazing to see the group is still going strong 12 years later, and I still get together once in a while with many of the original group members.
That was my first introduction to green chemistry. After I graduated, I moved into the nonprofit sector and took on a few different roles. I had several opportunities to return to research and debated myself regularly as to whether that was something I wanted to do, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into a tailspin. Ultimately, I took a moment to reflect on what I cared about, and two things immediately came to mind: education and sustainability. From that, I remembered Beyond Benign and Dr. Amy Cannon‘s presentation at the University of Toronto years before. So I reached out to Dr. Natalie O’Neil, who was leading the Higher Education program at Beyond Benign, and asked if there was anything I could help volunteer with. After a few months, a position opened up to support the development and launch of the GCTLC, and I was thrilled to be able to apply!
What features or opportunities within the GCTLC platform are you particularly thrilled about, and how do you envision it empowering educators, students, and sustainability advocates?
What’s amazing about the GCTLC is the community-driven approach and passion for bringing people and information together into one place, which makes the platform so powerful. The teachers, faculty, students, and industry champions tell us what they want to see and submit their content, questions, and comments directly to the site. In that way, users answer questions from other users, comment on other community members’ resources, and add their original work and great resources they’ve found to the GCTLC’s library. They share about upcoming events and important developments, so the platform is a living space that’s constantly evolving and changing. New pages with additional resources and links are regularly added based on community feedback. In particular, the GCTLC’s library lets users update their resources after they’ve been published, allowing them to go through additional peer review to help prevent information stagnation. This was the original hope for the platform, and it’s great to see it happening in real time. While the platform is still in its infancy, we’re incredibly excited to see this evolving and dynamic platform taking shape, molded by the very users that make up its membership.
You invested considerable effort in guiding the GCTLC Leadership Committee (now the Advisory Committee) to establish the platform’s core values at the outset. Could you share the importance of this step and how it shapes the GCTLC’s development and impact?
One of the first things we did with the Leadership Committee was develop the platform’s mission, vision, and core values in early 2021. This was a critical step at the outset as it helped us to articulate what type of community space we wanted to build, with feedback from the committee members as representatives of the wider community (representing teachers in K-12 and Higher Education, information management experts, education policy experts, and industry champions). Doing this before we had even chosen a developer allowed us to focus on how our committee would work with the development team and with us to build the platform, design the peer review process, facilitate conversation, choose specific design elements, manage community-contributed content, and data, create the layout for the homepage, and so much more. We have strived at every stage to uphold the core values in every aspect of the GCTLC, from the content we include and site accessibility to the functionality we add over time. We continue to hold those values as the core spirit of everything we do.
What features make the GCTLC platform a unique space for the green chemistry community? How does it elevate the accessibility and collaborative potential of green chemistry education materials?
Until now, there hasn’t been one central online place for green chemistry education content, resources, collaboration, and conversation. Some previous projects, including the Greener Educational Materials (GEMs) database, hosted through the University of Oregon, had aimed to fill this gap and provided a fantastic first virtual database for resource access and sharing during its lifetime (it was unfortunately shut down in the mid-2010s). However, given the many advances in technology and web development since then and the need to bring together many different functional aspects into a single site to meet community needs, the GCTLC provides a unique, next-level space for teachers and educators worldwide. In particular, the GCTLC’s foundation is built on two open-source, modular software platforms that allow for a wide range of additional functionalities and “power-ups” to be bolted onto the core system, allowing it to quickly adapt to changing community needs and expand on what it can do functionally. In that way, we can further enhance user collaboration and accelerate information access. One example is the broad interest in implementing a tagging feature where users can tag other users in comments to be notified when something might interest them. Another is our groups functionality launching soon, which we also hope will help facilitate collaboration and conversation.
We know group collaboration spaces are coming soon on the platform. Can you give us a sneak peek? What will this enable the community to do, and what should the community be looking forward to with this project? What are you excited about?
The groups functionality will allow users to join spaces on the GCTLC dedicated to specific topics or themes of interest with other users who share the same interests. Like Facebook groups, users can create new groups and invite other users to join them or join existing groups by searching through the groups listings. When creating new groups, users can customize the access and visibility settings (including setting up public or private groups), with up to six different group types to choose from. Once a user has joined a group, they can see other members, post questions, start new discussions, create collaborative project threads, and share files or links of interest.
We’ve heard from many of our community members that the group functionality is much needed. We have close to 15 groups waiting to get started with their own dedicated spaces on the GCTLC. The group functionality will help fill a long-standing gap in the green chemistry education community and further connect our community members from around the world.
How to get involved:
- Join the Green Chemistry Teaching and Learning Community (GCTLC) to connect with your peers in a collaborative environment focused on green chemistry education.
- Connect with Jonathon in the GCTLC to keep up with his work!
- Explore the GCTLC Trailblazer Guide to make the most of your experience on the platform. This guide offers tips for optimizing your profile, finding community members, locating helpful resources, uploading new content, participating in discussion forums, creating events, and submitting job postings.
