(668f) Not Your Average Flipped Classroom: An Online, Multi-Media “Textbook” for Introduction to Chemical Engineering

Students have been learning from traditional textbooks that are static in content and organization, and instructors constantly face the challenge of identifying a textbook that aligns with their own teaching goals.  Our goal has been to create an online, multi-media “textbook” for our Introduction to Chemical Engineering course that can be easily modified to fit the needs of different instructors and students and made freely available to the public.  We have aimed to make our evolved “textbook” (1) easily adaptable by using a modular organization with associated short video screencasts, solved example problems, and practice problems; (2) able to integrate many media types including text, screencasts, video demonstrations, and eventually applets; (3) easily updated so that instructors can modernize the content when needed or simply use their own favorite examples to illustrate concepts; and (4) free of any copyrighted material so that we can make it freely available to others to use in their own classrooms.  In our first iteration using this online resource, we have found that we now have the flexibility to use in-class meetings in a way similar to that of typical “flipped” classrooms, which is to discuss interesting current examples that apply concepts covered in the assigned module of the online textbook, discuss more practice problems, and integrate more interactive student learning activities.