The field of inorganic chemistry is heavily specialized into subdisciplines, which can make curricular innovation at the undergraduate level difficult for faculty with deep yet narrow training within a single subdiscipline. These challenges can be particularly formidable when faculty members choose to incorporate topics outside of their comfort zone into lecture and laboratory courses. Collaboration with colleagues from different subfields would be an obvious solution to this problem, but geographical and professional isolation, especially at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs), inhibits such interactions.
To address this problem, the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists or IONiC (spelled, appropriately, with element symbols) was formed. IONiC’s purpose is to enhance the inorganic chemistry classroom and laboratory experience for students and faculty members through the development of a vibrant virtual “community of practice”. Communities of practice are groups of people bound together by what they do— members “are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge” (1). The leadership council for IONiC currently consists of faculty from eight PUIs. The council is working to grow IONiC to encompass faculty and students from the full spectrum of educational institutions.
The community’s foundation is a cyber-interface that facilitates interaction and the collaborative development of learning materials and their dissemination to the wider inorganic community. This Web site, VIPEr (2), serves both as a repository for teaching materials and as a user-friendly platform for social networking tools, thereby facilitating virtual collaboration and community building. In VIPEr, teaching resources are organized by the appropriate subdiscipline of inorganic chemistry and by the type of “learning object”. A learning object is a small instructional unit, and the learning object type is determined by the context in which it is used, such as a laboratory experiment, an in-class activity, a literature discussion assignment, a resource for teaching writing, or even a problem set question.
Faculty and students can “dip their toes” into the community by visiting VIPEr, reading the forums, and downloading learning objects. Full participation, including the ability to comment and add new learning objects (which is strongly encouraged!) requires a simple registration process. The site provides more than just access to information. It invites participants to join in a community of chemists interested in working collaboratively to improve inorganic chemistry teaching.
Acknowledgments
IONiC acknowledges financial support from the Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement Initiative (Interinstitutional award), the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) Western Region Instructional Innovation Award, and the National Science Foundation (CCLI-0737030).
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