Personal Blogs

Preparing for the S207 revision day is a big challenge. The module covers such a huge range of physics, so students can ask questions about almost anything.

Last year there were three tutors along, and we relied heavily on Alan Cayless's experience and organisational skills. This year it will be just me and Robert Gibson running the event.

Robert and I exchanged one or two emails about the event, but we did not mange to get into regular contact, so I set out to prepare a plan for the day. I worked around building a PowerPoint presentation holding a set of revision questions and answers, and a very brief review of key topics for each book.

I sent this email to Robert about my thinking:

I have also worked through the "S207 Revision Examples". This is pretty good for the core of our session. I am thinking of turning it into a PowerPoint-plus-whiteboard activity. I would want to emphasise thinking physically about each problem first. For each book we could have a slide of some key physics issues. Then a Question slide. I would ask the students (as a group) to explain the issues and the physics solution method, then let them work it out in small groups. Then a slide of the 'official answer' (or our own version on the whiteboard).

I soon followed that up with an another idea:

 

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.

To support the students' work on nuclear magnetic resonance in SXP288 (Practical science: physics and astronomy) we need to run two Elluminate sessions fairly close together.  I decided to offer these fairly early as the information I had from students indicated they were making rapid progress through the NMR topic.  I used two Doodle polls to let students indicate their preferred days of the week.

The first session covers valency and covalent bonds, functional groups, structural formulae, naming conventions and isomers for some simple organic molecules.  The module team provide a short PowerPoint presentation based around fifteen slides including a few test questions at the end requiring students to identify structures and to draw structural formulae.

I reviewed the PowerPoint I used last year and made a few minor changes. This file ran to twenty slides. I had already included additional slides reviewing the naming conventions and I also split the test questions over more slides to improve clarity. I also stretched some of the images to improve the readability in Elluminate.

I prepared a pdf file from the PowerPoint slides, and used PDF Annotator (along with my Tablet PC) to hand write my speaking notes onto the slides. I also included all the annotations I planned to provide with Elluminate via the Tablet PC.

After printing this out I ran through the presentation myself.  I still felt that students would find applying the naming rules difficult during the test questions unless they had easy access to the appropriate material. Therefore I extracted a few key slides into a separate PowerPoint, and exported this to a pdf file. This was then posted on the tutor group forum along with a suggestion for students to print it out ready for the session.

I posted this file and discussed it within Elluminate with my colleague Sye Murray.

Al this activity took nearly a day.

6 March 2013

This was a joint session with Anne Campbell and her group, for the second level OU module S282 "Astronomy".

I wanted to make use of Elluminate's capability to host discussions between students (breakout rooms). The particular topic I chose was based on comparing images at various wavelength of the Sun. The aim would be to help students understand solar activity by identifying the different manifestation of the activity at different wavelengths.

The content was based on existing material - images supplied to students on the module DVD, and a TMA question from 2009. Using these materials helped me be confident that the topic was appropriate to the module.

I had also previously used the materials in a face-to-face tutorial session.

I drafted some notes on the topic. Anne seemed a bit cautious about how successfully we might be able to present this activity and manage discussion across several breakout rooms.

My approach was based on asking students to access the images independently during the session from the module DVD - either through the interface they should have installed at the start of the module, or by navigating to the appropriate folder and viewing them in their browser.

They would then go into small groups in breakout rooms to identify features amongst themselves.

To introduce the activity I set up two simple Elluminate quizzes.

The basic structure of the tutorial was constructed in the form a PowerPoint slide show, to be loaded on to the Elluminate whiteboards

Anne added introductory material to the session to introduce the group to the use of Elluminate.

We also provided material on answering TMA questions for the tail end of the session.

The final planning work was an email to the students: "During the tutorial we plan to use some S282 DVD images - in particular the Image Archive on the Active Sun and on the Quiet Sun. Would you load this up to your computer before the start of the tutorial, please?"