On May 12, 2020 the on-line course (MOOC) Estimation of measurement uncertainty in chemical analysis offered by University of Tartu finished successfully.
Eventually altogether 843 people registered (270 in 2014, 489 in 2015, 757 in 2016, 363 in 2017, 521 in 2018, 590 in 2019) from 95 countries (a number of participants joined after the start of the course). 600 participants actually started the course (i.e. tried at least one graded test at least once) and out of them 464 successfully completed the course (141 in 2014, 169 in 2015, 308 in 2016, 148 in 2017, 358 in 2018, 238 in 2019). The overall completion rate was 55% (52% in 2014, 34% in 2015, 40% in 2016, 41% in 2017, 42% in 2018, 40% in 2019). The completion rate of participants who started the studies was 77% (67% in 2014, 60% in 2015, 67% in 2016, 68% in 2017, 61% in 2018, 62% in 2019). The completion rate this year is the best we have seen and can be considered excellent for a MOOC, especially one that has quite difficult calculation exercises, which need to be done correctly for completing the course.

The participants were very active and asked lots of questions. The questions were often very much to the point and addressed things that are really important to analysts in their everyday work. The course has several forums (general and by topic) and during the course period the overall number of forum posts was close to 600 (!) (overall number of posts, both from participants and from teachers) and the forums are still active and posts are still coming in.

This active participation made teaching of this MOOC a great experience also for us, the teachers. The discussion threads gave a lot of added value to the course and some of them triggered making important modifications to the course materials, even during the course.

We want to thank all participants for helping to make this course a success!

We plan to repeat this course again in Spring 2021.

We recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the group of Daniel Seidel (University of Florida) in the field of enantioselective acidic catalysis. Prof. Seidel and his co-workers have developed Highly Acidic Conjugate‐Base‐Stabilized Enantioselective Carboxylic Acid Catalysts that are able to catalyze oxa‐Pictet–Spengler Reactions with Ketals. Our task in this endeavor was determining the acidity of the catalysts involved and elucidating the effect of the different elements of its substitution scheme on acidity. The main outcome is summarized in the scheme on the left. As can be seen, the most acidifying element is the substituted thiourea moiety, leading to one of the catalysts – the rightmost molecule. The findings strongly suggest that a key to the high acidity is the intramolecular hydrogen bond stabilizing the anion of the acid catalyst. These same substituents are also instrumental in the enantioselective catalytic ability of these catalysts.

This work has been published in Angew. Chem. Int. Edit. 2019.

Last week, the members of our Analytical Chemistry group celebrated Christmas together. 

After the traditional and tasty Christmas dinner, the not so traditional games took place. Everyone was dived into five teams. All of the teams had the same five tasks – they had to put their main senses to the test. But of course, the tasks required some additional knowledge of chemistry. 

The tasks were the following: identify common laboratory objects in a self-made and a not see-through “glove box” (touch); recognize the sounds of various laboratory machines, including the coffee maker (hearing); notice molecules and atoms in a drawing (sight); determine the concentrations of sugar solutions by tasting sugar solutions with known concentrations (taste); identify various alcohols and fragrant compounds by their aroma. The games of senses ended with a fun quiz.

                                   Touch

HearingSightTasteSmell

Wishing you happy holidays and a wonderful new year from our Analytical Chemistry group!