TEACHING
Organic Chemistry @ Stellenbosch University
Credit:Stefan Els/Matieland
I currently teach organic chemistry to all levels (1st year to honours) in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science at Stellenbosch University. Much of my teaching is available on my YouTube Channel. If you are an undergraduate organic chemistry student then please feel free to browse the YouTube site for more teaching material.
Organic chemistry is known world-wide to be a subject that many undergraduates struggle with, so my role in this area is certainly a challenge. The rest of this page is dedicated to various aspects of my teaching portfolio that have looked at the teaching of this facinating subject.
I believe that the most effective teaching occurs when a student is engaged in the learning process (Bryson & Hand 2007). When a student sees the beauty and value in the subject they are learning, half the battle is won and success can be almost guaranteed. The challenge that I set for myself is helping students find their passion for chemistry. To do this I need to be engaged not only with my students, but also with my subject, the teaching process and myself, knowing my own strengths and weakness in my teaching.
Organic chemistry has a notorious reputation for being very difficult, so connecting with the students that I teach is important to me. At each level that I teach (1st year through to honours) I need to recognise the differences that each year and class brings. Notwithstanding the bigger socio- and political issues of our day (e.g. fees-must-fall or decolonisation), each class brings a different set of challenges that I need to overcome. In first year, the classes are large and include about 95% students who will only ever do this first year course. This means that the majority are not particularly interested in the subject. Furthermore, the students in these classes often have several misconceptions and a poor understanding of the general chemistry threshold concepts that are needed to understand organic chemistry (Graulich, 2014). Recognizing this helps me hone in on the important material and guide my students to appreciate why the content and concepts that they covered ahead of organic chemistry is important. In second year, the class is much smaller, but still acts as a service module to more than 70% of the students. The challenge in engaging the students in this class is finding a balance between the higher-level teaching content and a deep understanding of the concepts being taught. This class is actually the one that presents me with the biggest challenge as the service students are less inclined to want to understand. I have worked hardest at developing the teaching methods I use in this class. Third and fourth year students are far easier to teach since this is their subject of choice. It is still important though to understand their own fears as they approach the end of their degrees, and keep reminding them of how much they already know.
Practically, in order for me to engage with students, I use a few different tools. The first connects with my approach to active learning (see later under teaching process) where I will walk around the class and interact with students as they attempt carefully chosen classroom examples. The second is making myself available for appointments. A few years ago, I found and asked for a scheduler app to be installed on SUNLearn. This app allows students to select an available appointment slot, therefore minimising their feeling worried that they are bothering me. The third is a mail merge program I incorporated into my MS Excel class spreadsheet which allows me to target specific students with personalised messages. Thus poor performers will receive an email encouraging them to keep working hard and come and see me if they need help, or top performers will receive a message of congratulations. I presented this tool at the 2018 SOTL conference.
For me organic chemistry has always been a fascinating subject and I love explaining it to anyone who has the patience to listen! To teach it, I know I need to be engaged with the subject as it evolves and develops. Thus, my own research and publications are part of this process and keep me up to date with developments. Even at the postgraduate level, our joint research groups have weekly meetings where we challenge ourselves to solve chemistry problems and hear reports on the latest discoveries. I fully believe that I am made a better teacher by being an active researcher in my sub-discipline of organic chemistry.
Active Learning
My philosophy on active learning stems from my own undergraduate days, where I found out late that the secret to doing well was to work through examples as these helped me to appreciate the practical application of the knowledge that I needed to know. Since chemistry is a science and therefore a logical field of study, the theory invariably made a lot of sense to me, but when presented with a question, I would often draw a blank as to where to begin. I see this in many of my students, and I always point them to the need to work through examples. It is in the ‘doing’ that we learn the best.
I therefore believe that for learning to be most effective, it needs to be an active process. To this end, the way that I encourage this also ends up being one of the biggest points of criticism from students. Firstly, I do not provide notes for my lectures. I prefer to avoid PowerPoint slides and rather write down (on the board or document camera) everything that my students should learn from a lecture. The shear act of writing is, I believe, a critical skill, particularly for organic chemistry where chemical structures and reaction mechanisms rule the day. The analogy I usually open with in my first lecture in 1st year, runs along this idea: 
I start by drawing a picture of a cat, not a good one since I am no artist! I ask the class what I have drawn, and invariably they all get that it is a cat. Following from this I draw the letters C-A-T and again ask the class what it is that I have drawn. Again, I will get ‘cat’ as an answer. I then draw attention to the fact that the three letters I wrote down are in fact just seemingly random squiggles on a board, and yet they all could not help themselves but see the word ‘cat’. If I then draw up the Chinese symbol for ‘cat’, pretty much no one would know what that meant, yet a Chinese person would find it difficult not to read the word ‘cat’. With this, I link the importance of active learning in organic chemistry – it is like learning to write a new language, and the only way to do this is to practice. Becoming familiar and comfortable with the organic structures is critical to understanding what is happening and this must be actively pursued.
The second thing that frustrates my students is my refusal to hand out any traditional memos for assessments. I know that I would have also been frustrated by this as a student, but I have seen and experienced the damage that memos can do, particularly to weaker students. Instead, I make it clear that they can come and see me if they want clarity on an answer, as I would far rather be their guide and help them through their misconceptions (again an active process). I have however blended the traditional memo with video into an online video memo, where I can work through problems and have the time to explain problems that my students have clearly been struggling with.
Cooperative Learning
I have started implementing cooperative learning (Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 2014) in some classes and practicals. I am excited by the studies on group work and believe that this has an amazing power to develop students in ways that simple lectures cannot (more details can be found in the methods section). This has been a difficult transition for myself, as it has shifted my teaching style. However, I believe that this active learning approach more closely mimics the real world. There has been some resistance in my classes as the workload is perceived to be higher, and as I myself learn to reorient my teaching methods.
Technology
I have been very involved in the blending of technological aspects into my teaching methods since I believe that technology has the power to augment the learning experience in a number of ways. Firstly, it makes learning more accessible by bridging the gap between the classic lecture, which is limited in time and space, and the digital age in which we find ourselves. Secondly, it provides a means of supporting the learning process, whereby students who struggle to grasp a concept quickly can revisit ideas many times until mastered. Finally, it allows students to engage with technology in a meaningful manner, which is a skill that is currently extremely important.
My biggest contributions in this regard have been my YouTube Channel, 1st year video pre-lab lectures and electronic assessment in our department (1st years). I have also recently started building online tutorials, which include formative assessments, and have requested and implemented new question types on SUNLearn.
Further Reading List
There are many great examples of active learning that I have not yet used in the classroom, and will certainly explore. Below are some links to articles and methods that speak more about the subject of active learning.
- Lectures aren't just boring, they're ineffective, too, study finds - Science 2014
(this is a commentry piece on an important study pubished in PNAS 2014 looking at active learning in STEM subjects) - Twilight of the Lecture - Harvard Magazine 2012
(an article on Professor Mazur, a long-standing advocate of active learning) - Active and Cooperative Learning - a good list of techniques from California State University.
I believe that my own enthusiasm for the subject of Organic Chemistry rubs off on students and helps them engage with the subject. Since I am passionate about organic chemistry, it really is very easy to communicate this passion to the students. I try to make myself as accessible as possible, so that the students are not intimidated to ask questions. My current teaching perspectives are strongly aligned to transmission and development, with a backup perspective of apprenticeship. The transmission perspective is certainly reflective of my own experiences of being taught, but more recently, I have found my teaching style gravitating towards development as I try to coax my students into deeper levels of reasoning and problem solving, especially through cooperative learning.
In my quest to influence and improve the learning experience of my students, I have also kept a careful check on what is working and what is not. I believe that careful reflection is critical to improvement and progress in my teaching methods. In the more than 10 years that I have been teaching in higher education, I have changed my style and methods many times. I have an infamous reputation amongst my colleagues for the number of changes I have constantly brought to both the teaching curriculum and methods! However, I am at least very fortunate that my colleagues do support my endeavours.
I find marking assessments to be one of the more challenging aspects of my work, not because they take time, but because I often spend a lot of time trying to figure out why students answer questions incorrectly, and how I could have helped them understand things better. Something that I have recently started doing is capturing the marks for individual questions in assessments (with the help of secretarial staff) and then analysing the results to see whether the questions are statistically balanced using a facility and discrimination index. This process has helped identify key areas of strengths and weaknesses in the class, which helps both me and my colleagues improve our teaching (albeit only in the following year).
My biggest mistake has undoubtedly been the implementation of the so-called elimination method in 1st year chemistry. My only solace has been that I was able to find a phoenix in the ashes and implement a much better system (see electronic assessment in methods section). Minor personal failures also include the beautifully made PowerPoint lecture slides and notes from my early days that are no longer in use (so much wasted time!).
The following section highlights some of the specific methods I have employed in my teaching, in order to encourage students to engage with the subject of organic chemistry.
My YouTube channel (click icon for link) has been developing over the last few years and contains an ordered series of teaching videos that cover my teaching at various levels. The videos are grouped into play-lists to make sense of the work covered in different teaching years, making content easier to find. I have used the videos for a flipped classroom approach, including cooperative learning, or to augment my classic lecture style. The videos primarily cover fundamental concepts, but I frequently also upload video memos to explain questions that I can see the class struggled with. I believe that the advantage of the YouTube channel is that it allows my students to engage with the core concepts over and over again until they are mastered.
Unexpectedly, I have developed an international following and have many subscribers now (over 1300). Student feedback has always been positive with students more often than not asking for more videos covering sections I do not teach. I am also quite interested in the new LightBoard that the university has built in order to improve the video offering I have.
I pioneered this in our Chemistry 214 course in 2017, after reading an article in Chemistry & Engineering News. The principle is that students are given ‘core’ tests that assess the most basic and fundamental knowledge that I expect them to know in my course. The difference to normal assessments is that the pass mark is set to 80%. If a student fails, they can rewrite the test, but they have to get 80% before being allowed to get a pass on their class mark. Students are generally extremely concerned about the high pass mark required, but soon see the value that the tests bring to their studies as they are directed to engage with what is truly fundamental to understanding and passing the course. Since exam questions vary from year to year, it is difficult to fully assess the success of this method, but qualitatively, our impression of students' answers, has shown a better grasp of the fundamentals.
The idea has been discussed in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science and we are looking at implementing this across our courses (we already do this in our third year course). The main reason for this is to make sure that our graduates leave with a BSc in chemistry with a minimum set of fundamental chemical facts and abilities.
I have also recently given two talks on this work: SOTL 2018 (where I received a certificate of merit) and SACI National Convention 2018.
I have recently been intrigued by the idea of group work, and wondered whether I could bring this into our chemistry course. I came across a good review article on cooperative learning (Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 2014) which expanded on my thinking of ‘group work’. The authors’ conclusions were that both the theoretical and practical aspects of cooperative learning have proven themselves in multiple circumstances at university level. I have therefore been implementing this strategy at a number of different levels. In 2018, I divided my 3rd year chemistry class into groups and had them operate in a problem-solving mode, where lecture material was delivered beforehand (aka flipped classroom). The feedback was positive, but I did make a number of mistakes related to how many questions I was posing. In 2019 I implemented groups in my 2nd year course. Here I did this for all tutorials and practicals as well as for my lectures. The feedback was positive for the practicals and tutorials, but very mixed for my lectures. This is an active area of development for me, so I will be adapting again for my classes next year.
For me the biggest appeal to cooperative learning is that students are made to engage with each other. These interpersonal skills are something that I believe are incredibly important in our world and need to be addressed at a university level.
These were an idea I expanded on from a trial batch of video lectures used in the 1st year course. I thought that we could use the pre-lab videos to introduce the 1st year students to researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science, improving our department’s engagement with the students. Each pre-lab video introduced a member of academic staff, including their research interests, and attempted to tie this with the practical that was to be done. The video format meant that students could engage with the material at their own pace and be more prepared for the practicals. The videos worked extremely well; feedback from staff involved in the practicals indicated that the students seemed more prepared for what they were required to do. All the videos were scripted, filmed and edited by myself. I was grateful that the Science Faculty gave me a licence for Camtasia, a video software editing suite.
Examples of the videos can be seen below:
This last example, with Prof Esterhuysen, is a parody on a popular YouTube DIY personality at the time in 2016 (Suzelle DIY). It was a means of injecting a little fun into the chemistry course!
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) have for a long time been a source of differing opinions among my colleagues, which is also seen in academia worldwide. MCQs need to be graded in a way that eliminates the very real opportunity to guess a correct answer. The traditional method has been negative marking, but many of my colleagues felt that this was unfair, and students tended to score worse when it was implemented. The problem is that for very large classes, MCQ questions are a way of assessing and getting feedback quickly, helping students to engage meaningfully with their work. Whilst there are definite disadvantages to MCQ questions, I feel the benefit to large classes far outweighs these disadvantages. However, pedagogically, MCQ assessment suffers from a problem of guessing, which means that some form of statistical method for eliminating guessing has to be applied.At the end of 2014, whilst researching better MCQ methods, I came across a method (Coombs, Milholland & Womer, 1956) I really liked. It was called the elimination testing method, and essentially had students eliminate incorrect answers, whilst leaving the correct answer unchecked. The benefit of this method was that students were not negatively affected by negatively marking, but were rather positively affected by being able to get some marks by demonstrating that they knew some answers were wrong (i.e. testing partial knowledge). The teaching team were excited about this option and it was implemented in Chemistry 144 in 2015. That year we used paper answer sheets that were supposed to be machine read, but it turned out to be a disaster. Thus I pushed for the assessment to be moved entirely electronically through SUNlearn, which then happened in 2016 for both Chemistry 124 and 144. This method of massive online assessment was a first for the university. At a SOTL teaching and learning workshop in 2016, we met with a Belgium professor from Leuven University who had also been pioneering this method(De Laet et al., 2016); she was impressed that we had been able to do this electronically as they had not been able to do this yet.
However, the story did not end up as positively as we would have liked. My wife (and colleague), Dr Katherine de Villiers, was justifiably frustrated with the limitations of MCQ style questions particularly for calculation-type questions. In late 2017 she had attended a talk that included SUNLearn's built-in assessment statistics. When I learnt about this and looked at the 2017 chemistry results I was appalled. The results clearly demontrated a complete lack of correlation between strong and weak students, basically meaning that the questions and assessment were not doing what we wanted. I immediately called for the method to stop. In 2018, another colleague, Dr Marietjie Lutz, gave a presentation at SOTL 2018 ("To Guess or Not to Guess"), which also looked at the failure of this method.
The purpose of MCQ questions is simple - it speeds up grading and thus feedback to very large classes. Moving to the electronic format speeds this up even more. Since I had not been physically responsible for setting up the elimination method questions mentioned in the previous section, I failed to realise that SUNLearn had itself a wealth of far better question-types from which to construct electronic assessments. Thus in 2018 I moved our Chemistry 144 course to this method. I also reintroduced essay questions that academic staff needed to manually grade (still online) so as to overcome one of the last deficiencies that electronic marking had, namely assessing a student’s ability to reason through an answer. Overall the results from the class test and exam gave a much better spread of discrimination and allowed us to see more clearly the strengths and weaknesses in the students. For 2019 I have also managed to get a 'drawing package' installed which will enable us to better assess our organic chemistry questions.
As with all things, this system is not perfect. It has several advantages: firstly questions can be carefully constructed to give excellent formative feedback. It is not easy, but by looking at student response, one can program the typical mistakes into the question so that the feedback is more helpful. This allows us as educators to engage with students, albeit via digital channels that are necessitated by large classes. A second major advantage is the speed at which feedback can be delivered to the students, and also the reduced marking time placed on academics. One disadvantage though is that it is difficult to award partial knowledge: this is something the students do not like. In paper-based assessments, a complicated equation would be marked by looking at the whole answer process, whilst electronic marking reduces this to a final answer (right or wrong). There are work-arounds, but it still remains an issue.
I have been involved in a number of aspects that have involved the development of educational aspects of our undergraduate teaching program in the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science at Stellenbosch University. Some information regarding these can be found below:
I was heavily involved in redoing the organic chemistry curriculum for 2nd, 3rd and honours organic chemistry (implemented in 2012). We have had very positive feedback from our external moderators as to the excellence of our course. Since I too moderate courses at other universities, I am pleased with the level and depth of our offering.
I also chaired the committee for the revision of the first year chemistry curriculum (implemented in 2013). This was a big change and required navigating quite a few disparate views regarding the content. Overall, it gave a more balanced first year curriculum to the students. I also chaired the department's honours course review in 2014 as I was honours convenor. Here the changes were essentially negligible as we concluded that we were not doing anything fundamentally wrong (although again there were differing opinions).
Finally, I also laid the groundwork for a new third year Food Chemistry module that was successfully implemented in 2018.
I introduced weekly class tests for our third year organic chemistry course in 2011, as I had come across some evidence(Halpin & Halpin, 1982) that suggested frequent testing was good for learning. This turned out to be successful (our grades in the exam and pass rate were extremely good) and in 2012 this was extended to the second year course and finally the first year course in 2015 (since electronic assessments were now possible).Weekly testing has both positives and negatives: on the positive side, students are encouraged to keep up to date with their work and they get greater exposure to the key concepts that are important in their course. This then translates into better pass rates for the course. On the negative side, weekly tests place additional pressure onto students since the marks count towards their final marks. The weekly tests may also remove student accountability to their own learning goals and development, thus stagnating the development of self-discipline. In the current context of 'pass rates' guiding success, the continuation of weekly tests seems inevitable. This is an area I am still pondering and working on and have already decreased the weekly testing in my 2nd year class (we now only do 4 core tests in the semester). I am also pushing for the weekly tests to be more formative than summative for our 1st year class, which will hopefully be implemented in 2020.
I am currently leading a team that obtained FINLO funding in order to develop live chemistry experiments to our 1st year class (during lectures). With the aid of two teaching assistants and staff members (Dr de Katherine Villiers and Prof Willem van Otterlo), the experiments have been sourced and presented in our Chem 124 and 144 course. Besides some technical difficulties we experienced, the feedback has been positive. Our main purpose with these experiments is to help demonstrate difficult concepts, so that the students can see them in action. We are planning to present this work at the 2019 SOTL conference.
In this section I have some examples of the evidence I have accumulated over the years regarding my ability to engage students and the teaching process. Student feedback in particular has been an important factor in helping me to see what I do well, and what I need to change.
I came to varsity wanting to learn chemistry then teach it ... I saw how you teach and my dream was revived that is why I never wanted to miss your lecturers.
One of the best lecturers I've ever had. Dr Arnott truly awakened a love of Chemistry in me and I am grateful to have had him as a lecturer.
The fact that he doesn’t upload notes and make you write your own notes in class. Helps a lot.
Good at explaining, works through examples with us.
Best lecturer I have had the privilege of encountering. Intelligent, thought- provoking and just generally created a happy study environment.
Excellent lecturer. Funny and engaging. Video lectures were very helpful. Pity was for such a short time.
The pre-class lecturers on Youtube were extremely helpful. His passion for what he is teaching also helps our motivation and dedication.
The enthusiasm and the humour. You bring the Chemistry so that everyone can understand.
The youtube videos. Very, very helpful. (Because you can pause, rewind, recap).
Generally, the feedback I receive has been very good, except in 2015 for Chemistry 344. The feedback in that year caught me by surprise, especially as there was no change from the course I taught in 2014 where I received extremely positive feedback. The common word that popped up in that feedback was ‘condescending’ which was a difficult pill to swallow. I had never received any feedback this bad. Nevertheless, I took the comments on board and endeavoured to be careful in how I engaged with future classes. Although I did not do a class evaluation for 344 in 2016, my other two evaluations for Chemistry 214 in 2016 and 2017 were extremely positive.
Every year students complain about the fact that I do not give notes or memos. I have come to accept that this will not change since this is core to my teaching philosophy. I do take time to explain to the class the reasons for me not handing out notes or memos, but as in many things in life there are always those who disagree with you.
| YEAR | COURSE (click for link to file) |
RATING |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Chemistry 154 (course convenor, but small sample) |
91% |
| 2014 | Chemistry 344 | 86% |
| 2015 | Chemistry 144 | 84% |
| 2015 | Chemistry 344 | 67% |
| 2016 | Chemistry 214 | 77% |
| 2017 | Chemistry 214 (course convenor) |
84% |
A brief summary of the feedback I get is typically:
| THE BEST | THE WORST |
|---|---|
| He is enthusiastic | He should give notes |
| Great YouTube videos | He should give memos |
One very positive form of student feedback has come from the first year academy at Stellenbosch University. Every year, the academy takes the top 30 1st year students (across the university) and asks them to nominate the lecturer they felt influenced them the most, and together they are invited to attend an awards meal. To date I have had seven students nominate me for this honour (see table - dates reflect year they were taught by me).
The last two were honestly a surprise since my contact time with the students in 1st year was reduced from a full semester (38 lectures) to 6 and 8 lectures in 2013 and 2015 respectively.
| YEAR | STUDENT |
|---|---|
| 2008 | Ms Amy Carlick |
| 2010 | Ms Alexandra Phillips |
| 2011 | Ms Quinta Joubert |
| 2012 | Ms Kirsten Mapstone |
| 2012 | Ms Paula Louw |
| 2013 | Mr Justin Hurst |
| 2015 | Ms Emma van der Merwe |
Matieland, the annual newsletter magazine of Stellenbosch University, ran a story that featured me and my YouTube videos in 2016. The article was titled “Student success through technology” and can be found on pages 42-43 by clicking on the image.
I was awarded a certificate of merit for my presentation on Core Testing at Stellenbosch University's 2018 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference.
In this section, I have added a relatively comprehensive repository of examples of my teaching materials and assessments that I have put together over the years. These highlight the direction I take in engaging students and the standard I like to maintain. The repository is large, so I have highlighted in blue the more important examples that speak to my philosophy and methods of engagement.
I have taught 1st year chemistry since 2007. In the years 2009-2010 & 2012 I was course convenor (in 2011 I was on sabbatical). In 2013 a new course was introduced, for which I chaired the curriculum review process. I designed the logos here to create a brand image for the new courses.
| Example | Comment |
|---|---|
| Video Lectures | This link is to the YouTube playlist of my lectures for 1st year chemistry. Some of these were actually made on request by students who wanted extra help in sections I do not teach. It speaks to me engaging students with technology. |
| 2010 Exam | This is an example of a themed exam paper, focussing on components found in herbs and spices. It speaks to me trying to enagage students through real-life chemical connections. |
| 2012 Exam | This is another example of a themed exam paper, focussing on components found in Deadly Nightshade. It speaks to me trying to enagage students through real-life chemical connections. |
| Teaching Media | This folder contains slide shows I created to demonstrate principles in organic chemistry. These were early examples before my YouTube videos, but I still use them on SUNLearn allowing students to engage with the matrial in a different way, at their own pace. |
| 1st year curriculum review report | This is the final report from the curriculum review committee regarding the changes to the 1st year curriculum. It speaks to my engagement with the teaching process. |
I have taught 2nd year organic chemistry from 2008-2011, and then again from 2016. In 2017 I started convening the course and introduced this brand logo using the university colour scheme to professionalise the course.
| Example | Comment |
|---|---|
| Video Lectures | This link is to the YouTube playlist of my lectures for 2nd year chemistry. |
| Practicals | These are the pracs that I revamped in 2017. I tried to move away from a recipe formula that had been given in the past, and also gave some context to each of the practicals so that students could engage more meaningfully with the practicals. |
| Weekly Questions | These were set as extra questions for students to attempt; they followed my lectures and were coded for core knowledge and general questions. |
| Study Sheet | I created a study sheet/table for the chemistry 214 course that is essentailly a list of reagents/functional groups/concepts that they should know by the end of the course. The sheet is purposefully left blank as the students are encouraged to fill it in themselves as a study tool. |
| 2017 Core Tests | The first example of the core tests we ran in 2017. The initial trial had the right idea but my colleagues and I agreed that in some instances we had veered from the true idea of 'core knowledge'. We had also given the students a selection of possible questions before the tests, which we agreed later was not ideal. |
| 2018 Core Attributes | In 2018 I created a more defined list of attributes and skills that we as lecturers (Dr Margaret Blackie, Dr Catherine Kaschula, and Prof Willem van Otterlo) believed to be core to organic chemistry. This helped frame the questions I then set in 2018. |
| 2018 Core Tests | I set these myself, and I feel they truly embodied the principles of core knowledge and skills. Each had a key theme that was examined, whilst still drawing from the overall knowledge that was considered core. |
| 2017 Class Test | An important change I introduced in 2017 was the idea of assessing practical skills in our tests and exams. Organic chemistry is at its heart a very practical subject (i.e. you get into the lab and make stuff), but I was not really sure if students could design their own experiments, or at least come up with the basic framework for getting a reaction to work and obtaining the product. The result from the class test was extremely disappointing since the practical component does take up much of the students' time. I have continued to address this issue in 2018, particulalrly by framing the stoichiometric calculations needed as being core skills. So far I have seen an improvement in this. |
| 2017 Exam | Besides the inclusion of the experimental question (see above), I also introduced a new style to the exam by having a total synthesis question and removing the multiple choice questions that I abhored. The total synthesis question even included chemistry that a 2nd year student would not have seen, but what was nice was that the target compound had a South African connection. Overall we had a just short of 80% pass rate for the course (up from 69% in 2016) |
| 2018 Exam Item Analysis | This is an example of the item analysis that I do to class tests and exams (see analysis tab). The analysis helps me and my colleagues evaluate the strength of our questions and look for ways to improve. |
I have taught 3rd year organic chemistry since 2009 and currently teach it with Professor van Otterlo who is the course convenor. Prof van Otterlo and I have worked very closely in developing this course, moving to a new textbook in 2011 and redoing the practical course in 2016 (this was driven by Prof van Otterlo). As with Chemistry 214, I introduced this brand logo using the university colour scheme to professionalise the course.
| Example | Comment |
|---|---|
| Slides | These are now redundant (2009), but are just an example of what I used to do. I no longer like Powerpoint in teaching as I believe students need to be more active in taking notes. |
| Lecture notes | These I created in 2011 with the introduction of a new textbook, but are now redundant since I no longer believe that they are the best way for my students to learn (this is a personal decision). I include them here mainly because in creating them I inadvertently created a 'format' that many of my colleagues then replicated and can be found in the 2nd and 3rd year courses. |
| Video Lectures | This link is to the YouTube playlist of my lectures for 3rd year chemistry. |
| Weekly Test Examples | These are examples of my tests covering the sections I taught in 2017. They include the branding I created. |
| Weekly Test Video Memos | This is a link to the 2017 weekly test video memos I did. Having the memo in this format allows me to more effectively engage students with the learning process. |
| Literature tutorials | I introduced the idea of having a 'take-home' tutorial in 2011 that worked through a paper from the recent synthetic literature. This allows students to engage with 'real-world' organic chemistry. |
I have taught Organic chemistry honours since 2007 (in 2010 I taught the entire course due to staff shortages). I have also acted as the convenor for the organic course (2010, 2014-2016) and also acted as the overall honours convenor (2014-2016). During my tenure as honours convenor I led a team looking at reviewing the course (2014), and also introduced a 'presumed pre-knowledge' list for students entering the course.
| Example | Comment |
|---|---|
| Slides | These are now redundant (2009), but are just an example of what I used to do. I no longer like Powerpoint in teaching as I believe students need to be more active in taking notes. |
| Lecture notes | These I created in 2012 - I no longer use them, but they reflect the 'format' I created in the 3rd year notes. |
In this section are some miscellaneous files related to my teaching.
| Example | Comment |
|---|---|
| Class Spreadsheet | I have developed a rather sophisticated spreadsheet to manage the large classes I convened in 1st year. This is now used by a number of different convenors in our department. It is driven by macros and is relatively user friendly with a number of very nice features mostly controled by its own toolbar in MSExcel:
|
| Student and Course evaluations | This contains all the electronic versions of the student and course evaluations that I have available. The older ones prior to 2010 are in hardcopy. |
- Bryson, C. & Hand, L. (2007). The role of engagement in inspiring teaching and learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 44(4), 349-362.
- Coombs, C. H., Milholland, J. E., & Womer, F. B. (1956). The Assessment of Partial Knowledge. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 16(1), 13–37.
- De Laet, T., Vanderoost, J., Callens, R., Janssen, R., (2016). Assessing engineering students with multiple-choice exams: theoretical and empirical analysis of scoring methods. Proceedings of the 44th Annual SEFI Conference; 2016; pp. 1 - 10.
- Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415
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