CourseOrganization

From ControlsWiki

The goal of this project is to provide the greater chemical engineering community with a useful, relevant, high quality, and free resource describing chemical process control and modeling. This project is being constructed as a collaboration between the faculty and students of the University of Michigan chemical engineering department. Initial construction of this resource began in Fall 2006, and will continue in future years with other groups of students.

The articles in this page are all written by teams of 3-4 senior chemical engineering students, and are peer reviewed by other members of the class. Using this approach, the faculty and GSIs teaching the course (Woolf, Barkel, and Hohne) act as managing editors, selecting broad threads for the text and suggesting references. In contrast to other courses, the students take an active role in their education by selecting which material in their assigned section is most useful and decide on the presentation approach. Furthermore, students create example problems that they present in poster sessions during class to help the other students master the material.

By having students create this public resource we gain the following 4 advantages:

1. The effort that students put into the course is captured to benefit the greater community. For this course of ~85 students, we estimate that a total of 5 human years will be invested into the course. If even one fifth of this effort is focused on writing a shared resource, then this effort represents one year worth of full time effort.
2. By having students synthesize the material themselves, we are training critical thinking skills. Traditional engineering curricula heavily focus on the quantitative aspects of engineering, giving students the impression that most problems have clear answers that are easily calculated if only given the correct equations. However, many realistic problems are more subjective and require the synthesis of large bodies of sometimes contradictory observations. By having the students create the text for this course, we are exposing them to the richer complexity of the field and also honing their ability to analyze more open-ended problems.
3. Students are responsible for evaluating the material produced by their peers, resulting in a more authentic grading system. Subjective, open ended problems are always difficult and time consuming to grade, and often result in situations where students become more expert at reading the minds of their teachers than at understanding the subject. In response, many engineering courses have moved away from open-ended problems and instead focus on calculation based analysis with unambiguously right or wrong answers. In collaboratively writing this book, the students receive anonymous feedback from their peers. This feedback method has two advantages. First it is faster in that it engages many students in the editorial process and thereby provides a fairer peer-review of the material. Second it gives students an opportunity to learn how to give constructive feedback in a safe environment.
4. By writing the material, students gain ownership of the material. All too often students are asked to learn material that they do not yet know how or why it will be useful. As a result, students have little ownership of the material beyond the exam or class where mastery is required. Our hope is that in the course of writing this text, students will begin to gain ownership of the material and further guide the field as to what should and should not be taught to future generations of chemical engineers.

The description for the Fall 2006 version of the course is here, along with the schedule and teams assigned to each article. If you have comments or suggestions about this project, or would like editorial access, please email Peter Woolf.