Abstract:

All faculty must stay up-to-date with advances in both research and teaching practices in their area of specialization. But at small schools, faculty must often teach far beyond their area of specialization, even in advanced courses. These faculty can benefit from sharing teaching expertise with faculty peers in other subdisciplines—peers who are likely to be at other schools and may be geographically distant. To facilitate such sharing in the field of inorganic chemistry we have developed VIPEr, the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource (http://www.ionicviper.org). VIPEr combines a repository of reusable teaching materials (or "learning objects") with social networking tools to form a rich virtual community of practice amongst inorganic chemistry faculty worldwide.

The vision for VIPEr began with the idea of a peer-reviewed repository of learning objects. Once technologists joined the group, the concept changed dramatically. In addition to being a repository, VIPEr provides social tools for developing community such as voting, commenting, polls, and discussions. To facilitate easy reuse of materials, we require that they be shared under a Creative Commons license.

VIPEr was structured to quickly appeal to inorganic chemistry faculty, from the layout of the site to its visual appearance. Many kinds of learning objects reside on VIPEr, including classroom and laboratory activities, selections from the primary literature that are suitable for class discussions, quizzes, and more. Each learning object can include notes about how it fits to the curriculum, learning goals, and how to assess student performance. Forums on a variety of topics promote community and provide a way to share expertise, point out new resources, or engage in dialogue with other inorganic chemists about course content and structure. VIPEr is under active development, and we continue to assess the function of the site through usability testing, user surveys, site statistics, and informal means. In the year since its launch, over 200 inorganic chemistry faculty have become active participants in the site, from schools around the globe. Many have submitted learning objects. The site continues to grow both as a repository and as a community hub.

While the academic scope of VIPEr is limited to inorganic chemistry, we believe that the lessons from this project are broadly applicable to other disciplines. Some of the most interesting lessons have arisen directly from the interdisciplinary nature of the project. For example, the chemists had difficulty relinquishing the idea of peer review before publication. The technologists are still learning how to help the community of chemists understand the dynamics and benefits of this "Web 2.0" model that is new to them. For the technologists it was difficult to understand why the site should incorporate so many details of inorganic chemistry into its structure, limiting what might otherwise have been a general-purpose tool (but one with far less appeal to or utility for inorganic chemists). And we have had to rise to many challenges related to intellectual property—from issues of copyright and legal compliance to concerns about how contributions to VIPEr are recognized in matters of faculty tenure and advancement.

Keywords:

collaborative virtual environments (cves), web 2, 0 and social networking, blogs.