Michael Seery

Keith Taber died recently and I was asked to write an editorial for CERP, the journal he edited for 7 years, and from whom I inherited the editor’s pen.

Over my time studying for my history degree, I had to write many essays and came to love it as a form of assessment.

My first GRC CERP was at Colby College in Maine, in 2009 (Chair: Tom Greenbowe).

Not long to go now til GRC CERP 2025…!

The 2025 GRC Chemistry Education Research and Practice meeting is being held on July 6 – 11th, 2025, at Bates College, Maine, with an overall theme of “Exploring Interactions in the Chemistry Curriculum in Physical and Digital Spaces”.

The hold the date for #MICER25 has just been announced (Edinburgh Napier, 21st May 2025) and it is a good prompt for me to share that I am launching a small research project to explore the impact of MICER on the chemistry education community.

#RSCPoster moved to LinkedIn this year – I am not sure it carried the same immediacy and conversation that it had on Twitter but that is probably the nature of the platform.

What do we mean by digital learning?

It seems like a long time since I wrote about preparation for Nyholm tour back in August 2022.

At university level the common understanding is that we used scheduled contact time – lectures, tutorials, seminars, recitation, and blessed laboratories – to share with students whatever content we think is important about our topic.

My new role involves contributing to academic development including our PG Cert in Teaching and Learning.

WonkHE had an article last week about pedagogy of care, and it prompted the strongest memory from back in the day of being a first year undergrad.

The future of the essay as an assignment type is reportedly increasingly in doubt as new AI bots are becoming cleverer.

The OfS have published their Blended Learning Review; comprising both the independent panel report, as well as the OfS response on things they think have regulatory implications.

The Chemistry Education Research Group (CERG) has had a difficult few years in the wake of COVID and the lovely people at RSC Networks have been working away in the background over the last year looking at how to help the group recover.

There is obviously a long history of incorporation of video as a learning tool in higher education, and of course over the last two years during the P-word, the use of video as a teaching resource has exploded.

It’s not possible to walk through a (virtual or physical) corridor in university these days and not hear someone mention “student engagement”.

In preparation for my Nyholm lecture tour beginning next year I have been working on the idea of a package that chemistry departments interested in reform of their laboratory curriculum could take and use in their own setting.

The Journal of Chemical Education has published a Festschrift in honour of one of the great champions of chemistry education and of chemistry educators, Professor Marcy Towns.

Congratulations to Xinchi Zhang for passing her PhD viva this week.

Recently I spoke in Dublin at the 2nd DCU Virtual Labs Seminar Series.

I woke up in the middle of the night this week and decided I was going to finally do my PFHEA.

This section covers a major aspect of thinking about your research project – your research question.

An overview of education research Education research is an academic discipline which focusses on exploring all aspects of education.

I have been lucky to supervise many undergraduate students as they complete their final year education research projects.

At MICER21, I spoke on the process of managing an undergrad education research programme at Edinburgh with a former student, Lee Ferguson.

Yesterday I was a panellist on an ACS Chem Ed Research Committee discussion on laboratory education.

The video below looks at how to overlay presentations with a mask so that it wraps up various media into a single cohesive presentation that you can screen share.

A working group of the RSC Education Division Council is completing an analysis of the assessment landscape and how it changed as a result of COVID.

On Friday 13th March 2020 I wrote to all students and staff in the School of Chemistry to announce that all teaching was moving online for the remaining three weeks of semester.

From the start of this month I began my slow fading away as Editor of Chemistry Education Research and Practice and I am delighted to say that involved handing over the reins to Professor Gwen Lawrie, who has taken up the position as Editor in Chief of the

An email the other day reminded me with some cheer that it is 66 days until students return.

As people begin planning recording materials for online delivery of lectures, one aspect to consider is the capture of hand-writing.

Much of our interaction with students involves structuring their work as they move through a curriculum.

Our exams begin next week, and our focus this week is getting students ready for managing themselves and their academic performance in the exam period.

I’ve received quite a lot of correspondence about the recent spate of posts and am very glad sharing my own thoughts has been helpful.

The last post discussed an advanced physical chemistry lab, and in this one I want to summarise more concrete plans for how we can move an early undergraduate lab online.

The last post discussed some epistemological considerations (roll with it) on moving chemistry labs online, sharing some concerns about trying to teach technique via fancy swipey-wipe interactions (roll with it).This one aims to be a bit more grounded.

Prelude The massive shift to online teaching and learning for us in Edinburgh focussed on lectures and tutorials, as we were comparatively lucky in timing – our semester starts and ends very early in the calendar year, which meant that our students were a…

In February I gave my Inaugural Lecture to celebrate the awarding of the Chair in Chemistry Education.

My colleague Chris Mowat and I co-wrote a blog post for our university’s Teaching Matters blog, which I am linking here as it pulls together a lot of our activities into one post, so might be useful for people in a hurry!

At Edinburgh, we are mostly moving to replacing our 3 hour exams with open book exams.

As mentioned in last post, we are focussing our current efforts on two strands – maintaining and promoting academic focus, and being active in student support, the second aspect being led by m’colleague Chris Mowat.

The internet has been full of amazing advice over the last few weeks on technical issues relating to moving online.

Over the last 10 years from 2010 – 2019, Chemistry Education Research and Practice, a free-to-access journal published by the RSC (of which I am currently Editor) has published 631 articles, which have been cited 5246 times (data from Web of Science).

This summer I published a very special book on teaching chemistry in higher education.

It is great news that there is going to be a Committee of Elders looking after future VICEPHEC meetings.

It has been an interesting (academic) year at Seery Towers and our fridge has had plenty of bubbly alcohol flowing through it.

Almost all academic promotion criteria will list teaching activities as one of the core areas where candidates will need to demonstrate evidence, but there is a growing population of teaching-focussed/teaching-only/teaching and scholarship/teaching fellow…

Such is the pace of life at the moment that major life events (well, major in my life anyway) pass by undocumented.