Here we are in the murky middle of the semester when all I can think about is a week off from teaching.  Friday can’t come too soon, and then I have a week that is mine…A week to prep for ACS...Denver is coming fast.  A week to catch up on grading and writing and gasp!... reading the piles of primary literature articles that I have stacked on my desk for when I have time.  Time to put some of the good stuff that I’ve done this semester on VIPEr maybe?  Time to plan for the summer workshop on Catalysis in Seattle?

One of the things that we are hoping to do in our blog posts this year is to highlight some LOs on the site that we've found useful in class.  I'm teaching inorganic this semester and would like to mention two LOs that I've used recently in class to help students visualize delta and lambda stereoisomers and find symmetry operations.  

A ligand orbital? Lorillard Inc. on the NYSE? Some new element that a bunch of scientists made 5 atoms of that lasted 0.2 microseconds? Well, in the world of VIPEr an LO is a learning object. Great...what's a learning object? Wikipedia defines a learning object as "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective".

I am now four weeks into teaching one of my favorite classes at Hope. The official name is Structure, Dynamics, and Synthesis II, but it is known to all as SUPERCHEM (cape not required)! The subject matter is symmetry, group theory, and computational chemistry.

It's Friday. I've just finished my first week of classes and I'm checking some things off of my "first week of classes to do list." Two of these things are related to the broader inorganic chemistry community - the ACS DIC Undergraduate Award in Inorganic Chemistry and the new Foundations of Inorganic Chemistry Exam being developed by the ACS Exams Institute.

One of the Leadership Council's New Year’s resolutions for 2015 is to get the IONiC community more involved with small projects on VIPEr.

It may be the first day of class, but my first inorganic exam is already coming up (January 28). We thought it would be fun to get some great exam questions on the website in time for everyone's first exam. Exam questions are easy to write and post (as problem sets). We’d love it if you participate in our first-ever exam question challenge.

Are you getting excited about the upcoming academic term? Are you looking for new things to use in the classroom or trying to find your old favorites on VIPEr? VIPEr’s Team Bug has something that might help!

Where did it go? It has been a roller coaster fall for the members of the leadership council, one we will never forget. But time continues to march forward. So, for our last BITeS post for 2014, I thought I would tell you a little bit about some of the exciting happenings with VIPEr. First of all, I think I should provide the 'answer' to our current poll. The answer is that there are registered faculty users of VIPEr in 36 countries around the world! It was quite a bit of work, but also a lot of fun to map this out.

Maggie Geselbracht.

The following was presented at a memorial service for Maggie.

(Adam)