(137f) Aiche Education Division Virtual Communities of Practice (VCPs): Updates from the 2020-2021 Academic Year

Since the campus closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, the AIChE Education Division has provided a supportive network for faculty development through the initiation and implementation of the Virtual Communities of Practice (VCP) Program. This program consisted of five communities focused on different areas of the chemical engineering curricula: (1) Material & Energy Balances / Thermodynamics, (2) Transport / Separations, (3) Reactors / Controls / Computing, (4) Design, and (5) Lab. Detailed descriptions of these communities, including survey analysis and results obtained from March to December 2020, have been previously published in Chemical Engineering Education.

The VCP program continued throughout the Spring 2021 semester and an additional survey was administered to participants to further study the impact of this program on different aspects of faculty professional development. Results aggregated from over more than one year of VCP meetings will be provided to highlight the impact of this program on the AIChE community. Plans for future iterations of the VCP program and associated faculty community-building activities will also be discussed.