2017 Newsletter Article 1, IONiC VIPEr: A community of inorganic chemists who create, share, adapt, comment on, and give back in order to improve student learning

Introduction

What is inorganic chemistry? The answer to this question is likely dependent on the person being asked. Wikipedia presents the highly insightful answer that “Inorganic chemistry deals with the synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds.”¹ Turning to a source with a vested interest in this definition, the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry (DIC) states that it “represents a diverse body of scientists who come together to understand and promote the richness of the chemistry of the elements.”² While both answers seem vague, additional digging through the DIC website provides some insight into the reasoning behind the vagueness. Bailar’s historical recounting of the DIC (which coincidentally is celebrating its 60^th anniversary) outlines how inorganic chemistry was initially grouped with physical chemistry and had to struggle to forge its own identity.³ Now, 60 years later, the division is comprised of six subdivisions in an array of diverse fields: bioinorganic, organometallic, solid state, nanoscience, coordination and sustainable energy and environment.⁴ It is this incredible diversity of the field that serves as the basis for the development of our community.

VIPEr: The hatching

Just prior to the 2006 spring ACS meeting in Atlanta, GA, a group of six inorganic chemists with funding from the Mellon Foundation met to discuss both the commonalities and difficulties they face in teaching their courses. They quickly realized that they had much in common, mostly centered on a shared need for combatting curricular isolation. Typically an inorganic chemist’s training in graduate and post-doctoral work is focused in a specific subdiscipline of inorganic chemistry. For example, an organometallic chemist is not likely to be well-versed in solid state or bioinorganic chemistry. While you may be exposed to some of that material in courses or at seminars, it is clearly not your focus. This can make it extremely challenging when it comes time to develop a broad survey course that is expected to cover the fundamental concepts across all areas of inorganic chemistry. Upon realizing that they all faced that same challenge, the participants at that initial meeting hatched the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC).

A second grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed the group to grow to eight, and this group, now known as the leadership council or LC, met for the first time at the Chicago ACS meeting in 2007. This group envisioned the establishment of a website as the online space for IONiC. Funding was secured from NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and the NSF-CCLI program. With this funding, the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resources (VIPEr - www.ionicviper.org) was launched in 2008 (Figure 1). [If you haven’t

Figure 1. Adam ‘Titanium’ Johnson pushing the official launch button for the VIPEr website at the Spring 2008 American Chemical Society meeting.
 

noticed, the dubious acronyms stem from the LC’s insistence that all names be spelled with element symbols.] Since then, the LC has grown to ten members with additional community participants pitching in to help with site maintenance. The LC members communicate daily using a persistent chat in Skype and video conference approximately every three weeks using Zoom. In addition, we have an annual project meeting where we meet in person to work on proposal writing, brainstorm ideas for future goals, and plan new features for VIPEr. While the website is an integral part of our work, it is the establishment and growth of a community of practice⁵ to improve teaching and learning in inorganic chemistry that remains our goal. Additional details on the history of this project have been reported previously.^{6, 7}
 

VIPEr: The website

The VIPEr website is what we are most known for (Figure 2). There are three different levels of public access to the VIPEr website: browser, registered user, and registered faculty user. Most of the materials on the website are available to anyone with an internet connection, while registered faculty users have greater access to features on the site including the ability to see answer keys and to upload their own materials for publication. When users request registered faculty status, an LC member verifies that they are a real faculty member. In addition to college faculty, faculty

Figure 2. The VIPEr website (www.ionicviper.org).

status can be granted to non-faculty users such as graduate students, post-docs, and high school teachers. There are now 1052 registered faculty users on VIPEr from 49 states (apparently Alaska and snakes don’t mix), 6 Canadian provinces, 6 continents (Antarctica is also not a place for snakes) and 36 countries (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Map of current registered faculty VIPEr users.

The VIPEr website is organized around four main components: teaching resources, workshops, forums, and BITeS. The first encounter with VIPEr for a new member of the community is most likely through the teaching resources. Teaching resources, referred to as learning objects or LOs, are materials posted by members of the community that undergo peer review prior to publication on VIPEr. At the start of the submission process authors must decide what type of LO they wish to publish: five slides about (an introduction to a topic, technique, etc.), in-class activity, lab experiment, literature discussion, problem set, textbook or web resources and apps. Problem sets are only accessible by faculty users, and other LO types feature faculty-only files that can only be accessed by faculty users. During the submission process, the authors select various metadata tags to classify their LOs. One such tag has the authors classify their LO by the topic(s) covered: atomic structure and properties, bioinorganic chemistry, coordination chemistry, electrochemistry, f-block chemistry, introductory chemistry, main group chemistry, molecular structure and bonding, organometallic chemistry, science skills, practices and resources, solid state and materials chemistry and spectroscopy and structural methods. LOs range from fully developed laboratories to single questions for homeworks or exams.

In addition to metadata tags, LOs include a brief description and student learning goals (Figure 4). If available, links to related activities and implementation and/or evaluation notes are included. Some of these data may not always be available when the LO is first submitted to the site, but we encourage authors to update their LOs as they use them in class.

Figure 4. Example of an in-class activity learning object (LO).

Finally, LOs are submitted with the Creative Commons sharealike license,⁸ so other VIPEr users can adopt and adapt any LO on the site, but authors maintain control of their work and receive proper attribution when their work is used or built upon by others. LOs contain a built in commenting feature so that users can report assessment and any modifications they’ve developed in using the LO. In some cases users have created modified versions of LOs adapted to different course levels, published those LOs on VIPEr and linked them to the original LO.  

Publishing LOs allows community members to share materials they found useful in their courses. The LOs do not have to be fully developed because what worked in your class may not exactly work in the class of someone else. But by publishing an LO you are likely to be helping out countless other faculty by providing a stimulating idea and an example of one way to implement it. In fact, the majority of our community only downloads materials from the site rather than publish new material, though we hope that as faculty users find the site useful, they will give back by providing comments or feedback on the LOs they use and contributing their own teaching materials.

Forums are designed for community members to interact on the VIPEr site. The four categories of forums are opportunities (typically job postings), research, teaching and faculty only (which are only available to faculty users). These forums provide opportunities for users to interact with the community members on any topic of their choosing. Some of the most popular forums are on textbook choice, developing course learning goals, and using technology in the classroom. Recently, we added a subscription feature to the website so users are alerted when someone has commented on their forum post.

A relatively new addition to the site is Blogging Inorganic Teaching & Scholarship (BITeS). This approximately weekly feature provides an opportunity to alert the community of upcoming events, new LOs, topics of conversation, or pretty much anything else the chosen BITeS author decides to present. The idea is to continue to draw the community back to the website so they know that even though they may not have used it for some time, there are still things happening on VIPEr.

IONiC: More than the website

While the VIPEr website provides a growing inventory of useful resources, building a community that enables inorganic faculty to flourish is the central part of this project. This has been and continues to be accomplished through a variety of different outlets. Since 2008, we have hosted oral and poster sessions entitled “Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry” at spring national ACS meetings. To date, we have had 359 oral and 798 poster presentations as part of our sessions within the DIC. This accounts for approximately 10% of the total number of abstracts in the DIC sessions at the spring ACS National Meetings over that time period. As part of these sessions we host a social hour which is an opportunity for members of the community to come together and interact on an informal basis.

A series of “back-to-grad school” workshops represents a second means of community building. These faculty development workshops brought together approximately twenty participants and three or four speakers from research intensive universities. The speakers presented one of their recent publications and then the participants developed literature discussion LOs based on those presentations. In addition to helping the participants overcome the barrier to their first VIPEr submission, the workshops allowed the participants to network and have meaningful discussions about the challenges and successes they have had in the classrooms. Presentations by the LC focused on learning by design, using the VIPEr site, assessment of student learning and general content knowledge. These workshops have been very popular and have spawned research collaborations and inspired participants to run their own VIPEr workshops at regional ACS meetings.

Finally, our community is having a significant impact on how inorganic chemistry is taught. Two LC members published a paper encouraging faculty to make their teaching more collaborative and “visible” using internet technologies.⁹ Our snakey mascot, Flo (Figure 5), has a Facebook page (ionicviper.org) and Twitter feed (@VIPEr_Flo) so that community members can receive updates through social media. We presented a viewpoint in Inorg. Chem. emphasizing the importance of presenting research in the classroom.¹⁰ Recently, several of us spearheaded a survey of what is taught in undergraduate inorganic courses.^11-13 Given the nature of the field, it is not surprising that there is a high degree of variability in terms of the material covered, the number of courses taught, and the placement of those courses within the curriculum.

Figure 5. Flo getting ready for the upcoming ACS meeting in San Francisco.

Conclusions

In response to a perceived need, the IONiC community and its web presence VIPEr were created to support faculty and improve teaching and learning in inorganic chemistry. After ten years, the community and the website continue to grow with over 1000 registered faculty users from around the world. The VIPEr website, which was initially built with learning objects posted by the IONiC leadership council, now contains a rich and diverse array of learning objects authored primarily by users of the site. The IONiC community and VIPEr website are so much more than a repository of teaching materials. The community has and will continue to have a significant impact on how inorganic chemistry is taught. We enjoy the catchphrase, “Come for the content, stay for the community.” It is clear that many inorganic chemists are doing just that.

References

1. Inorganic chemistry. Wikipedia, February 16, 2017,  (Accessed March 19, 2017), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inorganic_chemistry.
2. Division of Inorganic Chemistry. Division of Inorganic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, (Accessed March 19, 2017), http://acsdic.org/wordpress/.
3. Bailar, J. C., A History of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, American Chemical Society, J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 537 – 545.
4. Officers of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. Division of Inorganic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, (Accessed March 19, 2017), http://acsdic.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2017-ACSDIC-Officers.pdf.
5. Wenger-Trayner,E., Wenger-Trayner, B., Introduction to Communities of Practice, Wenger-Trayner, (Accessed March 20, 2017), http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/.
6. Benatan, E., Dene, J., Eppley, H., Geselbracht, M., Jamieson, E., Johnson, A., Reisner, B., Stewart, J., Watson, L., Williams, B. S., Come for the Content, Stay for the Community, Academic Commons, September 16, 2014, (Accessed March 20, 2017), http://www.academiccommons.org/2014/09/16/come-for-the-content-stay-for-the-community/.
7. IONiC: A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education, DivCHED CCCE, April 25, 2008, (Accessed March 20, 2017), http://www.ccce.divched.org/P4Spring2008ConfChem.
8. Creative Commons License, Creative Commons, (Accessed March 19, 2017), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode.
9. Reisner, B. A., Williams, B. S., Visible Teaching: Moving from a Solitary Practice to a Community Endeavor, J. Chem. Educ., 2010, 87, 252 – 253.
10. Jamieson, E. R., Eppley, H. J., Geselbracht, M, J., Johnson, A. R., Reisner, B. A., Smith, S. R., Stewart, J. L., Watson, L. A., Williams, B. S., Inorganic Chemistry and IONiC: An Online Community Bringing Cutting-Edge Research into the Classroom, Inorg. Chem., 2011, 50, 5849 – 5854.
11. Reisner, B. A., Smith, S. R., Stewart, J. L., Raker, J. R., Crane, J. L., Sobel, S. G., Pesterfield, L. L., Great Expectations: Using an Analysis of Current Practices to Propose a Framework for the Undergraduate Inorganic Curriculum, Inorg. Chem., 2015, 54, 8859 – 8868.
12. Raker, J. R., Reisner, B. A., Smith, S. R., Stewart, J. L., Crane, J. L., Pesterfield, L., Sobel, S. G., Foundation Coursework in Undergraduate Inorganic Chemistry: Results from a National Survey of Inorganic Chemistry Faculty, J. Chem. Educ., 2015, 92, 973 – 979.
13. Raker, J. R., Reisner, B. A., Smith, S. R., Stewart, J. L., Crane, J. L., Pesterfield, L., Sobel, S. G., In-Depth Coursework in Undergraduate Inorganic Chemistry: Results from a National Survey of Inorganic Chemistry, J. Chem. Educ., 2015, 92, 980 – 985.