IONiC: A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education

Depauw University, Greencastle IN

Investigators

Abstract

Chemistry (12) The field of inorganic chemistry is one of the broadest in chemistry, and it is heavily specialized into subdisciplines. For inorganic faculty with diverse teaching loads and deep yet narrow training within a subdiscipline, curricular innovation faces considerable barriers. Innovation is particularly formidable when faculty choose to incorporate topics outside of their comfort zone into lecture and laboratory courses. This project is enhancing the inorganic chemistry classroom and laboratory experience for students and faculty members through the development and growth of IONiC (Intellectual Online Network of Inorganic Chemists), a vibrant virtual "community of practice." The community's foundation is a cyber-interface that facilitates collaborative development of learning materials and their dissemination to the wider inorganic community. This website, VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource), serves both as a repository and as a user-friendly platform for social networking tools that facilitate virtual collaboration and community building. Using VIPEr, the project is developing and disseminating best practices for teaching inorganic chemistry by targeting three goals. Goal 1. Share Knowledge and Develop Materials Objectives: Develop and share educational materials for inorganic chemistry by initially adapting activities that team members are already using in their classrooms. Hold workshops, each dedicated to a single subdiscipline, to expand the knowledge base of the leadership team and allow them to collaboratively develop additional learning materials. Goal 2. Build Community through Cyber-Technology Objectives: Develop, learn, and test synchronous and asynchronous technologies for communication and community building among faculty. Use these technologies for providing feedback on materials development, facilitating discussion about activities related to the teaching and learning of inorganic chemistry, and building expertise so that the technologies may be used with students in later stages of the project. Goal 3. Test Materials and Technology in the Classroom and Assess Student Learning Objectives: Implement these educational materials in classrooms, assess student learning, and use assessment results to refine this course content. Test the use of synchronous technologies to network students between small classes and research groups from geographically separated campuses in joint learning activities. Through these interrelated goals, the project is creating new learning materials, developing faculty expertise, implementing educational innovations in the classroom, and assessing student achievement. The intellectual merit of this project includes (1) contributing to the knowledge base of inorganic chemistry teaching by developing, testing, and disseminating new inorganic learning materials; (2) contributing to the understanding of best practices for "virtual communities of practice" by assessing the impact of IONiC on the leadership group; and (3) developing knowledge about the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools for faculty and students. This project has broader impacts in the community of inorganic chemistry educators, through the growth of this community of practice, and the dissemination of new learning materials via VIPEr and the National Science Digital Library. The evolution of IONiC and the unique blend of virtual and face-to-face networking it provides serve as a model for other disciplines and groups of educators facing similar challenges and with similar goals.