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CM3261 - ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY

Academic Year 23/24 - Semester 1

 

Assessments:

  • CA1: 30%

  • CA2: 30%

  • Individual Poster: 20%

  • Individual Presentation: 15%

  • Class Participation: 5%

Lecturer: Dr Fung Fun Man

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Course Overview:

  • United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Element cycle, Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere (including structure of the atmosphere, air pollution and ozone hole), Waste Management, Environmental toxicology, Food chain, Climate change, Air and soil sampling

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Difficulty of the course: Average

Pace of the course: Too Fast

Duration provided to prepare for tutorials: NIL

 

Workload of Course (Average number of actual hours spent per week)

To learn the content: 5 hours

To complete assignments: 2 hours

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REVIEW

What advice would you give to someone considering to take this course?

 

Anonymous: Dr Fung focuses heavily on blended learning, so his lectures are prerecorded and you are expected to watch them before you go for the actual lecture slot where he uses to discuss broader implications of the topics – basically the recorded portion is more factual content (especially Chemistry related concepts), while lecture discussions are more of social issues or relevant examples where the concepts are being applied. To make up for the extra time to watch prerecorded lectures, he removed a lot of lecture slots in the second half of the semester, but you will have to be well disciplined to keep up with the schedule of watching the prerecorded lectures especially in the first half of the semester.

 

What did you enjoy or find most useful from this course?

 

Anonymous: It is a very interdisciplinary course and you will really see real life examples of the content we learn. The content is beyond the traditional scope of Chemistry courses where we focus solely on the Chemistry concepts. Instead, we are required to consider societal factors in the applications of these Chemistry concepts (eg. For the same issue, say waste management, why do different countries adopt different approaches to mitigate the problem?) Given this more open-ended nature of the course, he tries to facilitate discussions in class for students to share their opinions and their experiences, which helped me to see different perspectives and learn from other students’ sharings.

 

What aspects of the course did you find most challenging, and why?

 

Anonymous: Due to the nature of Dr Fung’s approach to the course content, there is often no definite right or wrong answer to questions, so for the tests there is no clear answer scheme. Instead, we are required to elaborate on our reasonings for our answers to the questions, which sometimes feels similar to what is being done in humanities subjects, so it might take some time getting used to.

 

What resources did you find most helpful in helping you better understand the course material?

 

Anonymous: I don’t think there is a need for additional resources, but I feel that having experience in the field of humanities (eg. Taking Geography in pre-uni/doing courses from FASS now) would be very beneficial for the skill sets required for this course.

 

What other courses do you think should be taken before or concurrently with this course?

 

Anonymous: NIL, this course is not exactly related specifically to any core courses.

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