I teach my organometallics course, a junior/senior level half-course, entirely as student-led presentations of the primary literature.  In the past, the course was populated almost entirely with seniors who had already taken a one-semester advanced inorganic course.  This past year, I taught it to juniors and seniors, and the juniors had not taken inorganic yet.  A description of the course first appeared in J. Chem. Educ. in 2007 (link below).  This VIPEr learning object is an update of the original paper based on my experience over the past two years.

This paper describes the synthesis and characterization of a Cr(I) dimer with a very short Cr-Cr distance.  Computational studies support fivefold bonding between the chromium atoms.  I have used this paper to introduce metal-metal multiple bonds and discuss the molecular orbital interactions of homonuclear diatomics including d-orbitals.  More generally, it is a nice example to stimulate the discussion of what constitutes a bond and the various interpretations of bond order.

This communication describes the first example of a discrete tetrahedral tellurate ion, analogous to sulfate and selenate.  This assignment was used as an introduction to the inorganic literature early in the semester.  Pre-discussion questions were adapted from the "How to Read an Inorganic Paper" learning object by Hilary Eppley.  In class discussion focused on communications vs. full papers, the essentials of X-ray crystallographic information, multinuclear NMR, and the periodic trends discussed in this paper.