Personal Blogs

This second NMR Elluminate tutorial is the core of the NMR tutorial work - it covers interpretation or prediction of the NMR spectra from protons within simple organic molecules.

We were provided with a short PowerPoint presentation of eight slides showing the structural formulae of three organic molecules and the corresponding NMR spectra.  Colour-coded version matched up the lines within the spectra to the chemical groups responsible for them.

As I am not familiar with this subject (apart from the short period spent teaching this module last year) I worked through all of the relevant module material.  I then found that working out the spectral features was relatively straightforward.  There was one feature whose details did not match up clearly to the rules of the simple models we used. I asked for clarification on this from the topic specialists on our dedicated support forum, but did not receive a response before the tutorial. 

The material covered in the PowerPoint was not enough for a tutorial as students would probably not to be sufficiently familiar with the topic to work through these examples within a tutorial. I referred back to the presentation I used last year. I had provided a summary of the rules at the start of this presentation. 

I made a few minor changes to improve the clarity of these slides, including stretching the content and darkening the colours. Then I rehearsed the presentation via Elluminate on my Tablet PC, using the pen to annotate the screens, including writing out the working.

My intention was to get the students to apply the rules for the examples. Therefore I extracted key screens containing the rules and placed them on our group forum for students to print out before the session.

In practise the session ran well. The students, although again reluctant to speak, did contribute and successfully worked through the three examples. They seemed to appreciate the exercise (though I have not had any specific feedback). I provided a pdf version of the annotated whiteboard screens on the forum afterwards.

The students attending the Elluminate session for SXP288 declined to speak in (or before) the session. This meant that the session was fairly hard to run. I asked a number of questions during the explanatory stage of the session and they responded (slowly) via the text chat or by using the typing tool on the whiteboard.

When we got to the test questions at the end they all participated by using the the text chat, or the typing tool, or other drawing tools on the whiteboard.

The test questions were generally handled well.

The session took about 75 minutes.

After the session I posted a pdf version of the annotated whiteboards on out tutor group forum and made the recorded Elluminate session viewable.

I also asked for feedback as the second Elluminate session was due in a few days. One student stated that I had hit the nail on the head - an excellent refresher on organic chemistry, building on S104 "Exploring Science" with useful handouts. The level and length were fine.

So the feedback was gratifying. I seemed to have achieved exactly what I set out to do. However the lack of discussion during the session is still a concern to me. I must be able to do better than this.

[19 March 2013]