Teaching crystallography online with MS Teams – comments,
examples
Radomír Kužel
Faculty of Mathematics and
Physics, Charles University, Ke Karlovu
5, 121 16 Praha 2
A few months of this crazy year brought high concentration on online teaching in basically all levels of education. Of course, the least problematic is such teaching in universities where many things can be transferred to online form without significant losses and in certain cases even with some benefits. So, the only part that cannot be done online is practical work, in particular the work that should teach students some skills. Otherwise, there are no limits for interactive communication during the online teaching. However, it may be easier for the teachers rather than for students. It can be more difficult and/or unpleasant to sit at the computer several hours a day.
Universities are supporting different
platforms for online teaching e.g. [1]. While for organizing of meetings I prefer to use Zoom [2, 3], for
teaching I have decided to prepare everything in MS Teams [4] in the form developed
by the Charles University [5] where it is easy to create a team for subject and
assign there students from the list of students of the University and/or
invited guests by e-mail or code.
In addition
to common meetings, as e.g. in Zoom etc., there is a common space
Our faculty
requires that all the presentations be recorded, and the records are available,
in addition to presentations (ppt, pdf), to all relevant students till the end
of semester. Both are saved in folder Files of MS Teams. This folder can also
contain some other shared files e.g. of Office like Excel or Word files.
Probably
the most useful part is Notebook that can contain different folders owned by
teacher only, shared for all and owned by each individual student. In the shared
folder anybody can write formatted text, draw, insert pictures, tables directly
in Teams or in One Note application with a few more advanced features.
Students
cannot see folders and pages of other students while the teacher can see everything.
So, the teacher can easily click on the corresponding page of any student and see
up-to-date information where the student is during his/her task. Teacher can also
write directly to their document. Usually, it is working quite quickly if the
Internet is not too slow. In Figure 1, there is a screen copy from the online
course where the students (left column) got different symmetrical patterns (right),
should draw elementary cell and corresponding symmetry elements, and determined
the plane group from the list. In order, to make their life easier, they could
use a portfolio of all symbols and it was then sufficient to move specific
symbols to relevant positions. A similar way was used for space groups (complete
diagrams of general positions with symmetry elements or vice versa complete diagrams
of symmetry elements with general positions, determination
or estimation of the space group)
A little more
complicated was preparation of online practical course. This is the basic
problem of powder diffraction – determination of lattice parameter of unknown cubic
phase and then also phase analysis of mixture of 3-6 phases. Since, the task
consists mainly in evaluation, it was decided to adopt this also to online form.
This practical part always begins with a short excursion in X-ray laboratory
showing them a few instruments, description of powder diffractometer, preparation
of different samples, specimen alignment and automatic measurement in symmetrical
scan. So, everything was recorded to video and what was only missing for
students was their own specimen preparation. This is followed by demonstration
of fast evaluation of powder pattern and generation of a file with peak parameters.
Students used this output (each with different parameters) to index peaks according
to procedure described on web link and determined the lattice parameter considering
the instrumental aberrations. The first part is closed by looking into the Powder
Diffraction File in order to find the phase. However,
usually it is not found because the lattice parameter deviates from the database
value from some reason. This reason is discussed.
In the
second part, the pattern was evaluated in different software, the list of peaks
was generated (2q, d, I) and the
students obtained scanned education edition of Hanawalt
index and made the search. Finally, for homework, the students should download
30-days trial of program Match and use it for the phase analysis of the
mixture. Each of the students received different dataset.
Finally, I
think that such tools can be well used for teaching even if, hopefully, we come
back to more normal time.
Figure 1. Copy of MS Teams screen during the
task of determination of plane groups for different symmetrical patterns.
[1] https://www.mff.cuni.cz/cs/vnitrni-zalezitosti/it-a-sluzby/sluzby/moznosti-pro-distancni-vyuku
[2] https://zoom.us/
[4] https://www.microsoft.com/cs-cz/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/log-in