Submitted by Kathryn Haas / Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN on Wed, 07/01/2015 - 12:02
My Notes
Description

At this website, you will find a link to the syllabus and all lecture videos for a "flipped" version of an Advanced Inorganic Chemistry Course taught at Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame, IN).  I used Shiver & Atkins for this course, and the format is based off of Dr. Franz's course at Duke.  If anyone is interested in the problem sets, I will be happy to share, although much of the material I used is from VIPEr.  

Learning Goals

Students will be able to apply fundimental principles of Group Theory, M.O. Theory, Acid/Base Theory, Crystal Field Theory, Kinetic & Thermodynamic trends, and 18e- rule  to understand spectroscopic (Absorption, Vibrational) and magnetic properties and to understand bonding and reactivity of metals.

 

Implementation Notes

This was the first iteration of a flipped model, I appologise for any mistakes & innacuracies, but if you spot issues, I'm happy to know about them.  The videos are rather long, and I will say that if I do this again, I will certainly design shorter videos!  Students really like it when the videos are 10-15 min or less.  But, perhaps these can help some beginning teachers prepare for class.  (And if that's you, good luck!)

Time Required
1 semester, 3 credit hour course
Evaluation
Evaluation Methods

3 x 1 hour exams, ACS INorganic Chemistry Final Exam.

Creative Commons License
Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike CC BY-NC-SA
Joanne Stewart / Hope College

This is awesome! I would love to hear more about your experience. Would you be willing to post some comments here to tell us more about how this worked for you?

Wed, 10/14/2015 - 00:06 Permalink
Kathryn Haas / Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN

Thanks, Joanne! This was my first time flipping a course, and I am happy with the results! But i will do it differently next time! Here are some lessons I learned (some will not be surprising if you are familiar with the education literature).

1) Videos should be short (<15 min..the shorter the better). Many of my videos were the same length as a traditional lecture (50-75 minutes). The students prefer several short videos in "topic chunks" rather than longer videos. less than 15 minutes is ideal (this is difficult and takes a lot of planning). My next mission is to make smaller topic videos to replace the longer ones, and link them together with the YouTube annotations features.

2) You can't just give out your old problem sets and work on them during class time. That's what I did at first, and I learned quickly that the really proactive students will get most of the problems done, while the less assertive students would not try very hard and leave everything for class time. This leaves you with an audience with diverse preparation and needs. In short, the proactive student are bored (and irritated) in class, while the less assertive ones are still barely keeping up. To fix this, I broke my weekly problem sets into daily in-class and out-of-class chunks. I assigned the easier problems for out of class (students watch the video and must finish 3-4 straightforward problems before class each day). In class, I gave them a more in-depth set to solve together. This let us focus as a group on solving the tougher problems, and encouraged enough pre-class prep. I even added some problems on top of the ones I had been assigning in my regular course format. Many of my in-class problems were from the VIPER community, while many of the out-of-class problems were direct from Miessler & Tarr or Shriver & Atkins texts.

3) The method I outlined in #2 worked like a charm! The students overall improved on the ACS inorganic chemistry exam. I have no other real assessment yet, but I am convinced that the students spent more time on problems overall with the flipped method, which is why they performed better on the exam. 

4) Expect some students to resist, so you've got to sell it to them on a regular basis. I tell my students as often as possible that we're doing class this way because research indicates that it is more bang for their buck (saves them time and helps them learn more). You'll certainly have at least a few grumbles from students who want to be lectured to, but don't let it discourage you.  

How I did this: Lectured for year 1 of the course (practice). Lectured/recorded using a tablet and Camtasia for year 2 (video production). Flipped and recorded some improved videos in year 3 (some improvement, used a light board a couple times). I plan to optimize the videos, problem sets, and adjust content in upcoming years.

I'm happy to answer any other questions! Good luck!

Thu, 01/28/2016 - 07:48 Permalink
Andrea Geyer / University of Saint Francis

I was so excited to find your materials!  I have a student who is taking inorganic chemistry as an independent study.  They will be a great resource in addition to the materials that I have laid out for her.  thank you so much for sharing!

Tue, 01/10/2017 - 10:44 Permalink