(88f) Reinventing Unit Operations Laboratories Post-COVID-19

With the emergence of COVID-19 in Spring 2020, faculty were forced to quickly convert face-to-face courses to online offerings. While this transition was a challenge across all courses, the need to move a hands-on laboratory experience to fully online required significant course modifications. As a result, faculty were forced to focus on laboratory learning outcomes to ensure that student learning goals were met in this non-traditional setting. Surprisingly, this opportunity to reflect on learning outcomes allowed many of the weaknesses of “traditional” unit operations courses to be identified. We will present our assessment of chemical engineering laboratory learning outcomes and how they are currently being satisfied in a traditional face-to-face unit operations course. To better meet the laboratory learning outcomes moving forward, we will discuss strategies for modernizing the teamwork, communication and problem-solving skills being taught in the lab through reinventing the unit operations course curriculum. Additionally, we will discuss two potential surveys: one to probe a broader set of unit operations instructors, and another to probe industry professionals. These surveys will ensure that curriculum changes meet both the standards and needs of academics as well as the ever-changing needs of engineers in industry. With this work, we aim to modernize the unit operations curriculum to better prepare students for their careers as working engineers.