Dear Students: 19 September, 2013 As announced in class, you will have the opportunity to earn some extra credit, and help other students at the same time! This will be done by submitting a URL for a chemistry video from YouTube (or other internet location: there are MANY of them). The ground rules are as follows: 1. You work in pairs: two students find a chemistry video of reasonably short duration (3-5 minutes is optimal, with 10 minutes being absolute maximum) that they think will benefit other students in the class. The video should help others by explaining material relevant to the content of this class. Explosions are NOT acceptable. Videos with profanity, etc., are clearly not acceptable. Khan Academy is NOT a great source of chemistry videos, sad to say. 2. The videos should be on topics relevant to our course, but NOT Chapter 1 of the OWLBook (too simple). Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are good places to start and you can look at the first page of the OWLBook chapters to see generally what would be good to cover with a video. We will keep doing this until Friday, November 22, 2013. 3. The URLs will be submitted to our graduate student TA: Chengfeng Ren. Her e-mail is [email protected]. The URLs are NOT to be submitted to me: if any are, I will just delete them, not forward them. Chengfeng will watch the videos, record the submitted URLs, record titles for the topics addressed in the videos, and the names of every pair of students who submitted the URLs. She will keep these in a Microsoft Word (or the like) file, update the file frequently, and post the updated file, with live URL links, as a PDF. It will be posted at our UDrive plus Moodle. Having your name in that posted file guarantees you 10 extra credit points toward your Final exam! The extra credit points will be shown in the OWL gradebook, as a separate entity in the exams category, later in the semester (not instantly: do NOT worry about it). 4. So, you and your partner find a helpful video, and send Chengfeng the following: a. The URL; b. Your names and student numbers (we have a number of students with the same names); c. A VERY BRIEF statement of why you think your video might help other students. 5. At the beginning of almost every class, we will use the iClickers to “grade” the submitted videos. You will be told in class which 2 or 3 videos to watch for next class. The grades will be A, A-, B+, B or “Not Recommended”. You will NOT be grading each other in any way: just how effective you think the videos might be in helping each other. Things to look for are accuracy (important to me), clarity (obviously important to everyone), production quality (minor importance, but not zero), sincerity, and/or whatever else you think is important in helping fellow students to learn! I hate to say it, but some folks on the internet just are not potential movie stars! Basically, we want a growing, evolving “crowd-sourced, but expert curated” chemistry video collection to serve as a learning and teaching resource for our class and especially future classes. 6. We want to avoid redundant video submissions, which just waste Chengfeng’s time, so please look at the posted list of URLs and topic titles to help avoid this. Looking at the list and looking at some of the videos also provides leads on other videos: there are hundreds, if not thousands, out there. Operationally, having the whole class ransack and pillage the web is brutally efficient, at least compared with one person having to do it all. 7. What if a video is not considered to be acceptable by Chengfeng? Then she can consult with me about it. If I agree that it is not acceptable for any reason, then the submitters will be notified, provided with a short critique of why it was unacceptable, and they can submit another video. Don’t take it personally: the web is loaded with both treasures and awful dreck, and sometimes one is frosted with the other. AlbertEinstein said “everything should be simplified as much as possible, but not more.” If you look at some of the comments below YouTube videos, it is quite clear that nothing will please everybody all the time, and some people are perfectly happy with videos that have been horribly mangled and are rife with absurd mistakes, just so long as the video is much shorter than a class period at their college, etc . Then they say bad or obscene things about their professor. Such is life. In any event, the idea is for any student who wants to earn extra credit to have every possible opportunity to do so, and help other students in the process! This is then a win-win scenario for everyone. You can submit multiple videos, if you want, but the extra credit is limited to 10 points maximum. But altruism is good! Best, Prof.
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