CSIE | UM
November 9, 2018
Panel: Strategies for Managing Conflict
Host: Mina Jafari
Roseanne Sension, Chemistry Ombudsperson and Kevin Kubarych, Chemistry Grad Chair talked about their positions at the department and the responsibility and confidentiality rules that come with it. Carly Friedrich from the Office of Student Conflict Resolution (OSCR) introduced this resource to the students and brought pamphlets that teach students different types of conflicts and how to manage them.
October 19, 2018
Seminar: How teaching online has changed my classroom
Host: Dan Nasrallah
Prof. Erland Stevens is a Full Professor at Davidson College, a relatively small (2,000 student) liberal arts college in North Carolina. Originally from Kentucky, he began his chemistry education at Duke University in NC with a B.S. in Chemistry.
For Grad School, he came to U-M and worked with Prof. Will Pearson. During his time at Michigan, Erland taught as a GSI with professors such as Prof. Brian Coppola. After receiving his Ph.D., Erland continued his studies with a post-doctoral position at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA with Barry Sharpless.
For the last 20 years, Erland has been a professor at Davidson. During his time at Davidson, Erland has taught a number of classes including organic chemistry I/II, bioorganic chemistry, and medicinal chemistry. More recently, he had the opportunity to modify his medicinal chemistry class to be offered as an online course through EdX. EdX is an online learning destination and MOOC (massive open online course) provider that a number of universities around the country contribute to.
The course was 7 weeks long, included 49 lessons comprised of 6-10 minute videos, and saw an enrolment of 10,000 participants from all over the world. After this experience, Erland wondered if this type of online experience could be incorporated into a classroom. This took the form of a flipped classroom for Erland’s organic I course. In this course, the students were assigned videos to watch before class and then in class they were randomly assign into groups to work on problems and examples including discussions of the answers.
This model pushes content coverage outside of class and focuses on problem solving and discussion in class. It also increases student-teacher interaction. Prof. Stevens is still collecting data on the outcomes of this style of teaching but enjoys the increased participation from students in class.
October 18, 2018
Workshop: Graphic Skills with Adobe Illustrator II
Instructor: Ren Wiscons
A person who is doing the work is best suited to create their figures and illustrations – for a candidacy document, an NSF proposal, a poster or a research paper.
On behalf of CSIE|UM and CALC|UM, Ren Wiscons provides a pair of Adobe Illustrator workshops at the SLC.
10/11 5:30 pm-7:30 pm: Fundamental Tools for Getting Started
10/18 5:30 pm-7:30 pm: Visually Communicating Scientific Concepts
October 11, 2018
Workshop: Graphic Skills with Adobe Illustrator I
Instructor: Ren Wiscons
A person who is doing the work is best suited to create their figures and illustrations – for a candidacy document, an NSF proposal, a poster or a research paper.
On behalf of CSIE|UM and CALC|UM, Ren Wiscons provides a pair of Adobe Illustrator workshops at the SLC.
10/11 5:30 pm-7:30 pm: Fundamental Tools for Getting Started
10/18 5:30 pm-7:30 pm: Visually Communicating Scientific Concepts
October 12, 2018
Discussion: Writing Diversity Statements
Host: Naish Lalloo
The audience was made up of a range of both post docs and grad students.
The workshop with Dr. Nicole Tuttle (CRLT) was interactive. The group discussed our own experiences with a partner, and also got into groups to talk about pros and cons of some sample diversity statements.
September 24, 2018
Workshop: ChemDraw
Instructors: Janelle Kirsch & Amie Frank
A group of about 30 undergraduate and graduate students attend the ChemDraw session.
Feedback was uniformly positive. The most popular topic was how to program your own shortcuts to make it more personalized/user-friendly.
August 28, 2018
Workshop: Computational Methods
Hosts: Blair Winograd & Allison Roessler
On August 28, 2018 CSIE|UM hosted a special workshop entitled “An Introduction to Scientific Computing” during the graduate student orientation.
The workshop was focused for students pursuing computational research paths, but it was open to any incoming chemistry graduate student. The session was entirely interactive and allowed students to become familiar with the common computational methods used in high performance computing (HPC) environments. Students worked together in small groups on each activity.
This workshop is important as many of the methods used in HPC are commonly used in computational chemistry research, but they are never introduced in undergraduate chemistry education.
Many attendees expressed their interested in offering a yearly workshop for incoming graduate students.
On April 6th, CSIEUM hosted a FFGSI Update event to give 30 attendees an idea about the types of projects FFGSIs participate in. During the program, attendees heard about three projects featured thermodynamics, organic chemistry, and coding.
Laura Motta Medina & Alan Rask, from the Zimmerman Lab, discussed “CHEM 463: The Thermodynamics of Sustainability” where they developed homework problems and discussion content relating thermodynamic principles and models to real world phenomenon such as the green house effect, hurricanes, and black holes. The students were able to relate these concepts to their everyday life and discover the strengths and limitations of simple models for real world problems. For their final project centering on sustainability, the students proposed topics including thermodynamics of recycling and ocean circulation, among other ideas.
Janelle Kirsch & Evan Bornowski, from the Wolfe Lab, highlighted their work on a new CHEM 216 course entitled “Medicinal Chemistry: Anti-Cancer Drugs.” The objective of this new course is to bring current research into introductory laboratories. The 31 students that participated in this lab synthesized 24 analogs of a novel molecule shown to have anti-tumor activity in triple negative breast cancer cells. Additionally, the partnering medicinal chemistry research lab assayed these analogs to compare their activity to the original target molecule.
Finally, Ellen Mulvihill, also from the Geva Lab, gave an update on the course “CHEM 230/260 Honors Studio: Compute-to-Learn.” Open to all types of students, most without any coding background, this studio course gave students the opportunity to engage in creative forms of active learning while acquiring familiarity with a widely used software package. Students participate in tutorials and training related to Mathematica software, research and propose an original demonstration idea, workshop the idea during design and production stages, and finally submit the final product to external review prior to publication and dissemination on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project website.
On April 4th, CSIE|UM hosted Professor Jeff Moore from the University of Illinois to discuss his work on designing a new organic chemistry course.
Prof. Moore described the philosophy behind the fully web-based course and shared some of the advantages/disadvantages of the curriculum. For example, he explained how the web-based course made it easier to grade exams, but made it harder for students without self-discipline to remain up-to-date with the material.
Overall, attendees learned about the care that must go into courses to make them efficient and fruitful for students taking the courses.
Your Chemistry Research Skills are Transferable to Education
Professor Sam Pazicni (UNH) led an interesting and provocative CSIE|UM discussion, in which he developed the idea that one’s basic laboratory research training (identifying interesting problems, designing good experiments, developing collaborations, reading to inform yourself in new areas) is a proper foundation for transferring skills over to educational development and research.
A number of times, the conversation returned to the particular challenges of carrying out social science research relative to physical science research, the advantages of forming collaborations with faculty colleagues in areas of education and the learning sciences, and the various opportunities available to U-M graduate students to pursue education-related work.
