Drylab Course on Non-first-order NMR

• The course is meant to be used in a taught dry-lab class environment with a staff : student ratio of about 1 : 10, in which the staff (postgraduate demonstrators or academic staff) spend all their time helping students to succeed in doing the exercises
• Students are allowed to work alone or together in groups, according to their preference
• We have run the predecessor of this session as a 'dry' drylab, i.e. one without computer use, in which students work through the provided worksheets using a hand calculator, and the demonstrators check the answers when required
• Assessment requirements are minimal, because by the end of the session, practically all of the students should have succeeded in doing all of the calculations correctly, and have learnt a lot in so doing
• Based on our experience, used in this way, the work should take able second year undergraduates about 4 - 5 hours, probably split over two sessions
• The data in the worksheets has been generated using the NMR simulation program NUMARIT, so using the material as a drylab exercise in a computer cluster room, where students could check their results for each system by feeding them back into NUMARIT to find out whether it correctly regenerated the provided data from their results, would be a viable and useful alternative, of a type which we have used successfully to teach other parts of structural chemistry and chemical spectroscopy
• NUMARIT for Windows is available for free download, and is intended to be easy to use, to set up simulations starting from hand-calculated chemical shifts and coupling constants, such as are obtained by the methods taught here
• It would be easy to devise follow-up exercises using NUMARIT for Windows, in which the student went on to investigate the effect on the spectra of these systems, of changing some of the NMR parameters, e.g. J / delta