(247c) Keeping up with the Student by Introducing New Technology Into Chemical Engineering Courses

Our current students probably spend more time on their laptops, blackberries and IPod's than reading their textbooks. In order to keep up with the students we need to make our engineering classes more interactive and take advantage of technologies such as tablet PC's, ?clickers?, WebCT and Facebook. Presented here are some ideas used by the Villanova Chemical Engineering Department for integrating technology into our courses. Some of the courses developed using these technologies include both traditional chemical engineering core courses (Heat Transfer Operations) as well as chemical engineering elective courses (Biomaterials, and Special Topics in Drug Delivery).

For all of the courses, a simple method to include technology started with keeping all course files on WebCT. This allows students constant access to lecture notes, homework solutions and their grades in the course. This also allows the student to see where their grade is relative to the class average for all assignments. WebCT can also be used to create practice quizzes for students to test their knowledge of the course material.

Since students are issued laptops at Villanova University as part of their tuition, it is easy for us to take advantage of this and make all notes ?paperless?. Most of the faculty has access to tablet PC's where we can write on the screen during lectures. This allows us to send out to the students the incomplete or ?starter? set of notes that are on the screen. These notes include some key words, definitions, equations and images. This allows the students to time to add their own notes either by hand or on their laptops, and gives them more time to listen to teacher. To make the learning even more interactive, a set of ?clickers? were purchased from Turning Point Technologies Inc. These ?clickers? and corresponding software allow the teacher to poll the class and have the results appear graphically on the screen. The ?clickers? have proven a fun and effective way to see if the students are following the theory that was just introduced in the lecture. The ?clickers? are also extremely effective and keeping students interested in longer class periods.

One of the newest methods of keeping up with the students is to introduce ?on-line? office hours. Many have done this using AOL's instant messenger. Almost all students are now on Facebook, so taking advantage of this technology, online office hours can be hosted here as well. A course page can easily be made that only current students can be allowed to join. In this page anyone can post questions and answers. It can also be extremely effective method of connecting students who do not live on campus, or who have questions late at night.

These ideas for integrating technology have been successful for our courses and we look forward to sharing these and hearing more ideas from colleagues at AIChe.