Just in time for the fall semester, our next roundtable discussion will address assessment of student learning in the time of COVID. As with many other aspects of teaching, the pandemic has affected assessment activities at the course and departmental levels. Shirley Lin (US Naval Academy) will facilitate this SLiThEr on how to use literature discussion LOs, a VIPEr speciality, as an assessment instrument. She will briefly discuss how to adapt/design literature discussions for this purpose and how to use chemistry education research methods to analyze and report results.

Next week Joanne Stewart (Hope College) will host a discussion about facilitating group work in an online environment. Just like our other SLiThEr’s, this is meant to be an informal discussion about strategies for faculty teaching. Join us on Zoom on Thursday, August 13th at 4 pm EDT (GMT-4) for this sixth VIPEr SLiThEr (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable) event.

Next week, Kari Stone (Lewis University) and Anthony Fernandez (Merrimack College) will facilitate a discussion about their favorite LOs and how they use these LOs in their courses. Come prepared to talk about your favorites as well or ask others for suggestions to help you teach a particular topic. Join us on Zoom on Thursday, August 6th at 4 pm EDT (GMT-4) for this fifth VIPEr SLiThEr (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable) event.

It is hard for me to believe that five years ago I was writing up a manuscript for submission to a special issue of Polyhedron focused on undergraduate research. Jared Paul of Villanova University and Rob LaDuca of Michigan State served as guest editors for this issue. Their initial goal was an issue with around 25 papers. They shattered that goal putting together a collection of 63 papers!

Join us on Thursday July 30th at 2 pm eastern (GMT-4) for the fourth VIPEr SLiThEr (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable) event. Our roundtable host this week will be Caroline Saouma of the University of Utah. The event will begin with a ~30-minute presentation by Caroline followed by a period of discussion and reflection for all participants.

Feeling anxious about the upcoming fall term?  Not sure how to plan a course that could ping-pong between in person and remote learning?  Consider adopting the flipped classroom approach, in which content is delivered asynchronously and "in class" time (whether that is in person or remote) is used for problem-solving activities. 

Last week we launched a new community feature, SLiThEr (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable). Kyle Grice hosted this first event on converting labs to being virtual. We had a wonderful attendance, and if you weren't able to attend you can catch the whole thing on our youtube channel.

This past week at the second workshop for the Cohort 1 VIPEr Fellows we had some really great conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. In my breakout group, one of the topics of discussion was ideas for how to make students feel welcome in our classrooms: what were the little things we could start to do that might make a big difference? One specific point a group member noted was that we all care about our students, but the students don’t always recognize that because we don’t necessarily tell them directly.