Chemical Education Today
Award Address
Communicating Chemistry—From Large Classes to the Larger Public 2003 James Flack Norris Award, sponsored by the ACS Northeast Section1 by David N. Harpp
Classes Shortly after arriving at McGill in the summer of 1966, the then chair of Chemistry, Leo Yaffe, a man not to be trifled with, asked what courses I would feel “comfortable” teaching. Having had a few opportunities in graduate school (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and on my postdoc (Cornell University) to lecture to some fairly sizable classes in introductory organic chemistry, I said “intro organic”. Yaffe then said that my assignment in September that year would be two consecutive classes of 250 persons each. My instincts said that this was not a good idea as I was quite sure I would sometimes mix up material given to one group and not the other. I then countered (not at all expecting an affirmative response) with “How about combining the two groups together in one class?” His answer was “OK”. I am not sure if I had any intelligent rejoinder other than to prepare my classes—somewhat fearfully—over the remaining weeks of the summer. It was the extraordinary size of these initial classes that I believe gave me the motivation to make the innovations that are described here. The first class was held in what was then and still is, the largest lecture theatre at McGill University, holding somewhat more than 600 students. There were indeed 472 who received final grades in this first class. The lecture hall was in a fan shape but it was still the largest I had ever been in and was initially quite intimidating. Fortunately, the students were not only bright but generally quite polite, and a good communication partnership was struck. The blackboard in the room was too small for effective use thus the overhead projector was employed in each class using the “dictation” method that still prevails today in many classes. It did not take long to realize that the use of molecular models in such a large room was useless because of the small size of the models relative to the very large room. Using unwieldy super-sized models was not an option. It also did not take long to note that sometimes the class “bogged down” during some of my efforts to explain complex concepts. That is when Thomas Jefferson’s pantograph (often called a polygraph) came to mind. This mechanical device produced “originally” signed multiple copies of documents. It seemed all I had to do to quell background chatter was to lift my overhead pen and begin to write. There would be instant silence and it was as if my pen were connected to theirs. Attention was paid and the class became orderly. While this was an interesting and oft-repeated phenomenon, it somehow did not seem right. I often threatened myself to write nonsense to alert the students to the foibles of this methodology but I never did. Later in the semester, I decided to 786
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introduce summary handout notes so that listening might be enhanced, but I still encouraged note-taking. Handing out notes turned out to be a risky business as I had to run for cover to avoid the feeding frenzy that followed when I first placed 500+ sheets on a desk at the bottom of the lecture room. The problem of visualizing material was substantially solved by using 35mm slides, permitting large pictures of molecular models, people, and places to be used; this greatly aided the class. Needless to say, the notes were soon given out ahead of time and over the next few years were compiled into a “complete” course pack along with old exams and various practice questions and answers. In the early 1970s I collaborated with my colleague T.-H. (Bill) Chan in writing a set of problems and answers in both multiple-choice and traditional format. The well-known Roberts, Stewart, and Caserio text “Organic Chemistry: Methane to Macromolecules” was linked to this problems book that I believe was one of the first to deal with “interesting” problems combined with relatively complete answers. In the fall of 1968 I attended a presentation where the lecturer happened to be using lap-dissolve projection to illustrate his talk. This is a technique that permits highly registered images to be shown via a light-dimming device. Two projectors are focused to a common point on the screen and the image from projector 1 (slide 1) dissolved to projector 2 (slide 2) and back to projector 1 (for slide 3, etc.). The obvious extension of this was that it could now be possible to create “animations” of conformational analysis, color changes, and various visually interesting sequential events for portrayal in the classroom. This was an epiphany for me and interestingly the lecturer, a media expert, did not think much of the technique and urged me to make 8mm movies for class, an experiment I had already tried with only modest success. In those days, movies were quite the rage for the classroom as they provided a more live portrayal of lab, instruments, and sometimes molecular model manipulation. The medium was not very effective for large classes as the image was small and somewhat indistinct and suffered from a general lack of control by the instructor. I abandoned it immediately in favor of lap-dissolve projection (1, 2). This lap-dissolve technique really was the forerunner of the now well-known PowerPoint method. My eventual collaborator on this project was James Snyder, now of Emory University. We quickly made up numerous sequences, some of which are still used today in PowerPoint in their recently digitized form. Lap-dissolve methodology was used with much success in every class I taught until the Fall of 2000 when PowerPoint completely took over my presentations.
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Chemical Education Today
Award Address Lap-dissolve projection was a technique that was used by a number of researchers in organic chemistry for a few years, but hauling around the equipment was not so easy to do. I took an entire set of projectors/dissolve unit to Sweden for a research conference in 1972. My lecture made quite a stir as such a visual method had not been used before in chemistry at the research level. In 1974 Snyder and I presented a paper on conformational analysis of a special organosulfur compound at an international conference in Wales. It came to my mind just before my talk that Derek Barton had won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry just five years earlier and was Honorary President of this particular conference. Needless to say, I was significantly nervous when he happened to come to my contributed talk. He apparently liked the animations that ensued, and he awarded me a signed bottle of sulfur for the “elegance in exposition” (as he put it) on the bottle’s label. This event certainly gave me added confidence that this sort of effort was worth the time and trouble. For me, these innovations have made even very large classes a pleasure (3). In the past three years, we have developed an effective lecture “retrieval” system at McGill. Since the fall of 2000 (http://cool.mcgill.ca standing for COursesOnLine) this Webbased method captures all of the visuals, maintaining their sound synchronization. This permits the entire lecture to be stored and made available on a university server 24/7 for any student with a computer anywhere the Internet is available. This has had a major effect in the dozen or so courses (most in the chemistry department) that now employ this technique at McGill; I believe that this greatly assists in helping the students to be even more independent. This year nearly 6,000 students will have access to their courses by this methodology (4). With “Cool”, attendance is diminished somewhat but the majority of students still come to class in the traditional fashion. The great advantage is that they can afford to miss a lecture now and then for pressing matters in other academic endeavors, personal problems, or illness. Students are most appreciative but they do not burst into spontaneous applause as they did when the first lap-dissolve sequence was shown in class in March 1969. What appear to be “media miracles” to more senior professors are more or less “expected” by today’s students who have grown up with technology. Nonetheless, surveys clearly reveal the help this methodology provides. As one professor in pathology indicates, “verification questions are more than 50% reduced”. The ultimate goal of the student as independent learner may be a step closer. Needless to say, in very large classes, contact with students is not optimal. It is easy to decry this situation, but it is a problem that has to be dealt with in most large institutions.
A Complication of Large Classes It is ultimately important if the communication of chemistry is to be of high quality, that the reflection of this communication, namely the exam system used in the class, is also of appropriate caliber, particularly with respect to fairness. Needless to say, with such very large classes, it is necessary to use the multiple-choice format for some of the exams in the organic courses, and it is relied on exclusively for the World 788
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of Chemistry classes. In the Spring of 1989, a student reported to me that there had been an event of copying on a World of Chemistry course (see below) during the final exam. Initially this student was not willing to give more details but eventually did. The outcome of this information was that it was discovered that about 5% of the class had copied extensively on the exam. These data were clarified by developing a computer program that compared the answers of all student pairs and then verifying that all statistical outliers sat immediately adjacent to one another. This unfortunate circumstance held true in most large classes. Over the years, many faculty members from other universities have consulted on this topic, finding virtually the same results at their institutions. As a consequence of this necessary investigation, McGill University now has a Senate-mandated policy of scrambled seating and exams for this type of evaluation. In the past few years the incidence of copying has been reduced from about 5% to nearly nil. Only two suspicious cases were detected by a university scan of all multiple choice exams in the last semester (5). The new policy is not hard to maintain and students comment that they are pleased that this type of exam is now a fair one for all. Public Outreach In the fall of 1978, Mario Onyszchuk, then department chair at McGill, approached me and asked if I would organize a public display of chemistry demonstrations at the old Expo67 World’s Fair Site in Montreal. I initially said “Thanks, but no thanks.” I had a research group to deal with, not to mention the various organic chemistry classes. However, a brief re-thinking of this initial reaction gave reason to pause. Clearly if the work could be divided, it might not be so difficult to accomplish. I immediately thought of two recent Ph.D. graduates from our department, Joe Schwarcz and Ariel Fenster, who were both teaching in the Community College system in Quebec. I had heard they were excellent instructors and perhaps would be interested. They were, and we invented several different demonstration stations and trained six undergraduates in a special part of a large pavilion on the former fairgrounds. Over the next two summers, more than 80,000 persons visited the chemistry site. We had occasion to mount a similar campaign at the Old Port of Montreal in the summer of 1995 with nearly 400,000 visitors (6). There were five stations (much like those in a science museum) where trained undergraduates delivered 10–15 minute (PowerPoint aided) lectures with suitable demonstrations. These demos centered on polymers, food, beverages, and color changes in chemistry. There was a separate 20-minute mini-show in a small auditorium where an assortment of classic chemistry experiments were performed. In the fall of 1979 we were asked to give a series of ten lectures on the simple aspects of food at a nearby community center. It turned out to be overkill in that we three gave the lectures using two projectors (lap-dissolve) with a usual audience of only about 18–20. However, we completed the series and found ourselves with three 30-minute sections of
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ten lectures on this important topic. These ~900 minutes were soon translated into a public lecture format and a series open to the public was started in the fall of 1980 in the Chemistry Department at McGill; it has continued to this day, and more than 70 three-part presentations have been given (7). After the first year of nine lectures to audiences of about 200, we started the first of what are now four different courses deliberately styled for any student on campus regardless of faculty. At present we give each of these courses once each year, and deliver one of them during the day and one in the evening in each of the two academic semesters. Enrollment is usually overbooked at about 300–400 per class in one of the lecture theaters at McGill. The material eventually expanded from this initial course to four specific courses devoted to food, drugs, the diverse aspects of chemistry (including forensic, scientific publishing, biotechnology, plastics, combustion, rocketry) and the environment. The audience is a blend of students and “civilians” (8). The students have a reasonable written account of what is to be described by way of a course pack, and the lap-dissolve projection (and now PowerPoint) provide the visualization/animation of most of the ideas that make up the heart of the organic chemistry course from conformational analysis to synthetic schemes. The same techniques hold for the World of Chemistry courses. With the transfer from 35-mm slides to digitized images, a great many slides (about 16,000) became obsolete. While my colleagues and I tried to find “takers” for the more than 300 slide trays that had been accumulated over these many years, it seemed that the only way to gain back the space they took up in the department was to discard them. This was not an easy task to carry out; we even thought we might give one to each student in the World of Chemistry course as a “souvenir” but realized the vast majority of them would not have any idea what they were. In 1999, my two colleagues and I were able to start a unique venture, The Office for Science and Society at McGill with Joe Schwarcz as Director (9). So far, it has been a strong success to a great extent due to Schwarcz’s regular radio show, his Discovery Channel efforts, books, and regular column on chemistry in the Montreal Gazette. Fenster has added a great deal to our efforts with his work on radio, TV, and with the French community—both adult and high school. This overall effort is the ultimate lesson in “parking one’s ego at the door”. We each have different roles to play in this work and we hope that the general public and McGill are the beneficiaries. Our Web site at http://www.oss.mcgill.ca (accessed Mar 2004) is updated regularly and contains a host of useful scientific and chemistry facts in simple language.
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Along with the “Cool” site, we believe we can continue make a contribution to our students and to the general public alike. We have just started a series of short lectures (10–15 slides with commentary) that are presented using “Cool” on issues in the public interest. In conclusion, it is satisfying to reflect that my organic chemistry mentor in the 1950s, Grant Harnest of Middlebury College, won the Norris award in 1974; 16 years later one of the students in my first class at McGill, my friend and colleague, Joe Schwarcz, was the first person situated outside the U.S. to take home this prize. Thus, I have the (likely) unique distinction of being chosen for this award having both a mentor and a “mentee” in this distinguished group of chemistry teachers. Note 1. This paper is derived from a talk given at the presentation of the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society, held November 6, 2003, in Newton, Massachusetts.
Literature Cited 1. (a) Fine, L. W.; Harpp, D. N.; Krakower, E.; Snyder, J. P. J. Chem. Educ. 1977, 54, 72; (b) Harpp, D. N.; Snyder, J. P. J. Chem. Educ. 1977, 54, 68. 2. Chem. Eng. News 1971, 49 (Jan 18), 22; J. Chem. Educ. 1977, 54, February cover. 3. Harpp, D. N. J. Chem. Educ. 1994, 71, 629. 4. Harpp, D. N.; Fenster, A. E.; Schwarcz, J. A.; Zorychta, E.; Goodyer, N.; Hsiao, W.; Parente, J. C. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81, 688–690. 5. Harpp, D. N.; Hogan, J. J. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 306; Harpp, D. N.; Hogan, J. J.; Jennings, J. S. J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, 349; Harpp, D. N.; Hogan, J. J. J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 482. 6. Chem. Eng. News 1995, 73 (Jun 1), pp 24–26. 7. Chem. Eng. News 1988, 66 (Jun 20), pp 29–31; Fenster, A. E.; Harpp, D. N.; Schwarcz, J. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 771. 8. Fenster, A. E.; Harpp, D. N.; Schwarcz, J. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 819. 9. Chem. Eng. News 2000, 78 (Aug 14), pp 44–45.
David N. Harpp is in the Department of Chemistry, McGill University, 801 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2K6;
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