As the fall approaches, it seems more likely that there will be at least some need for virtual labs this fall. When we first faced this problem in the spring of 2020, there was a need...a need for speed. With no planning time we had to get some kind of lab experience put together quickly. You did a great job! But now that we have a little more time to think about this, you might be wondering how you can do it better. 

To help answer that question we are hosting a mini-workshop that we hope will be the first in a new series called VIPEr SLiThEr (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable). This SLiThEr will be hosted by Kyle Grice of DePaul University, and he will be talking through some of the materials he created for his inorganic lab, which he conducted completely virtually. We will be holding this via Zoom on Tuesday, July 7th, at 12 pm eastern daylight time (GMT-4). It is expected that this event will last one hour. During the presentation there will be opportunities for asking questions and sharing your experiences, so I strongly encourage you to attend if possible. If you can't, we will be recording the session and making it available on our YouTube channel. If you do plan to attend in person, we ask that you register prior to the meeting. The zoom link will then be emailed to you the day before the SLiThEr. We will not be posting the zoom link on the website or in social media. The short registration form can be found here.

Future SLiThEr topics are just starting to shape up. There is a Drupal (the platform that the VIPEr site is built upon) upgrade coming soon, and we will do a SLiThEr on those upgrades/changes. Any ideas you have for topics are certainly welcome, so feel free to comment below, post an idea to the Discord comm_chat, or contact a member of the Leadership Council directly. We look forward to seeing you on the 7th and stay safe!