As this semester comes ALMOST to a close, I’ve begun to think about my Inorganic course this semester.  What was the most successful? What would I have changed? What was I most excited about?

I think for the latter it is that I FINALLY made the jump to teaching (most) of my bioinorganic unit using primary literature articles.  I am very far from an bioinorganic chemist  (in fact, I never even took college biology), so this was a big step for me. I used a modified versions of three Learning Objects from VIPEr ("Literature Discussion of Hexamminecobalt(III) – Probing Metal Ion Binding Sites in Nucleic Acids by NMR Spectroscopy", "Cobalt Schiff Base Zinc Finger Inhibitors", and "Modeling post-translational modification in cobalt nitrile hydratase with a metallopeptide") and found a couple additional articles (Learning Objects coming soon!) as well.  A good number of the students in my junior/senior inorganic course are actually biochemistry majors, and distributing them among the groups I had working on various aspects of each paper really seemed to work. As a bonus, I didn’t have to be the “expert” on all of the bio pieces and was able to model for students how we can apply the basic knowledge of coordination chemistry and spectroscopy we gathered through the semester to a new piece of chemistry.

As far as what I would have changed, I’ve got a list. I need to change up a couple labs, work on integrating more recent literature into some other sections (especially sold state chemistry), and integrate some different assessment methods into the course.  It’s the assessment methods that I’m going to work on figuring out this summer.  I’m contemplating having a part of each exam be an oral portion (would love feedback if you’ve tried this). I’m also thinking of having students use film/media to produce their descriptive chemistry projects (currently they either write a Wikipedia article on a compound or do an infographic). In both cases, I’d like students to be able to communicate the chemistry they know and reason through unfamiliar problems.  We’ll see what next year brings!

And what about you? What went well this semester (and can you post it to VIPEr?)?  What would you have changed?