Free online courseAdvanced Organic Chemistry

Course Description

Strengthen your organic chemistry confidence by moving beyond memorizing reactions and into the way chemists actually think. This free online course is designed for learners who want a deeper command of structure, reactivity, and evidence-based reasoning, bridging what you already know from foundational classes with the tools used in higher-level problem solving and research-style analysis.

You will build fluency in the language of complex molecules, including challenging cyclic frameworks, and learn how careful naming connects directly to interpreting structures and predicting behavior. From there, the focus expands to stereochemistry, where small 3D differences create large changes in physicochemical properties and chiroptical outcomes. By training your eye for stereoisomer relationships and stereochemical labeling, you will be better prepared to anticipate selectivity and understand why one product forms preferentially over another.

The course emphasizes mechanistic thinking and the factors that control reaction rates, helping you connect common pathways with concepts from kinetics and transition-state analysis. You will explore how substituents and electronic effects influence outcomes, how linear free-energy relationships can support mechanistic conclusions, and how temperature and conditions reshape the speed and feasibility of transformations. This perspective makes it easier to reason through unfamiliar problems instead of relying on pattern recognition alone.

You will also develop intuition for modern synthesis logic by learning how carbon–carbon bond formation strategies fit together, including aldol and related pathways, conjugate addition concepts, and polarity-inversion ideas that open alternative routes. Along the way, you will sharpen the strategic mindset behind retrosynthetic analysis, turning complex targets into workable sequences while keeping selectivity and practicality in view.

To connect theory with real molecular proof, the course builds a strong foundation in NMR interpretation. You will learn how chemical shifts arise, why coupling creates splitting patterns, and how 1H, 13C, and 2D approaches support decisions about regiochemistry and stereochemistry. By the end, you should be able to approach advanced organic problems with a more systematic toolkit, improved accuracy, and a clearer sense of how evidence supports conclusions in the laboratory and in the literature.