Boris’ case is a challenging one as time always seems to be a predominant factor that works against building in content according to student needs. Additionally, the case calling for both instant and formative feedback is a tall order, and one that a teacher doesn’t come by without either a steep technological learning curve or by dedicating abundant amounts of time outside of class to support either students or the creation of media.
Boris should probably begin by creating a series of video tutorials to reinforce the periodic table content that he is aiming to support. Since information about the periodic table would be comprised of mostly static knowledge in a Chemistry 11 context, he could very likely use these comfortably from year to year over multiple iterations of courses without changing them.
After creating the video tutorials, Boris could use a tool like Google Forms or Moodle’s built-in quiz application to have student quiz themselves, or use these to study for exams. Each of these tools could easily tell them what they did right and wrong; the tricky part here is giving formative feedback. I am not as familiar with Moodle’s quiz tool, but I know that Google Forms allows you to route a form according to the respondent’s entry. So, for example, if a student picked an answer of “False” incorrectly, they could be re-routed to a page that gave them feedback on the fact that that answer was incorrect and why. After that page, they could re-answer the question and continue along with the quiz. Likewise, if they answered “True” correctly, a page could appear that reinforced their response and told them why the statement was indeed true, and they would, again, carry on with the quiz.
This strategy would provide immediate feedback for response correctness as well as make an attempt at giving formative feedback. A drawback to these methods is that the feedback isn’t necessarily personalized as to why the student might respond correctly or incorrectly. Additionally, Boris would need to be insightful as to why students may or may not make particular mistakes; this insight would help to provide the best possible feedback to students as they quiz themselves. Lastly, it would take Boris some time to build, particularly if he was not familiar with the affordances of routing pages on quiz tools. However, if successful, he could also reuse these quizzes with immediate and formative feedback throughout future iterations of the course as well.