Are you ready for... 2019? ...the International Year of the Periodic Table? ...becoming more involved on VIPEr? ...a year full of IONiC Community Challenges? The New Year is a great time to dive in and give back to the community!
While I always have great intentions to contribute to VIPEr, I find it much easier to contribute a new Learning Object when I have a very focused and BITe-Sized project to work on. Since community challenges have a pretty specific focus, I usually can dust off something from my files that needs only a little information to make it shareable with the community.
Flo and her friends would like to make 2019 the year of the community challenge by asking the IONiC community what they'd like to see added to VIPEr. What do you want to see more of? Specific content in inorganic chemistry? Specific types of LOs? Do you keep a list of recent papers that you know would make great lit discussions... but you haven't yet had the time? (Maybe we could help put together a group of people to put togehter a new LO...) Even more important - would you be willing to lead a community challenge?
This year's first community challenge will be devoted to VIPEr's relatively new LO - the syllabus LO. I challenge each of you to upload the syllabus for your inorganic chemistry class. If you teach more than one, submit a syllabus for each course! Unless you don't teach inorganic chemistry, you can't use the excuse that you don't have a syllabus!
To create your syllabus LO, go to the create content tab at the top of the home page on VIPEr and select "Syllabus." In addition to the file, you'll need to enter some basic information about your course and your syllabus and any related files like your class schedule. We strongly encourage you to include your learning goals and link to the VIPEr LOs you use in your course.
So here are my New Years challenge(s) to you...
- Share your syllabus on VIPEr as an LO.
- Respond to this post with ideas for community challenges this year.
- And if you're really up to the challenge, volunteer to lead a community challenge. It's not that much more work; you need to describe the challenge to the community in a BITEs post and submit one yourself.
Breaking news! I snuck into Joanne's suitcase and stole some prizes. I can't such much about them other than they are super limited edition VIPEr swag that only a few lucky people will get to own. And one of them could be yours. We will award prizes to randomly selected submitters that get their syllabus LO submitted to VIPEr before Groundhog Day (that's 02/02/2019).
At the last workshop I went to, someone was talking about using a single figure or scheme from a literature article (instead of the whole article) as the basis for a literature discussion/problem set/exam question. This exposes students to current or important literature topics but is shorter and has the advantage of avoiding parts of a paper that may be too dense or advanced for the course.
Could we do a community challenge with this? I know I'm always looking for fresh exam questions.