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This Work in Progress paper describes the instructional use of computers in first-year engineering courses at the University of Kentucky (UK), a large public land grant institution which is the primary source of engineering graduates in the state. The College of Engineering (COE) at UK has transitioned to a common first-year experience from previously separate departmental introductory courses paired with one of two required computer science courses. The goals for the new curriculum are to increase retention, standardize the number of credits in each degree program and allow students to explore before committing to a specific plan of study. For the new computer programming course, the content pairs the sensors and actuators commonly utilized by a variety of engineers with the programming skills needed to collect and interpret data. These skills carry over to the team design project that involves programming, sensors, actuators, construction and testing of a complete system. The programming skills carried into the sophomore level courses have been well received by some departments and less than satisfactory to other departments which has led to more deliberate independent programming assignments. In this paper, we describe the implementation of in a new course sequence for ~900 students per year and preliminary results from course evaluations across the engineering curricula. While the program has only been in place 3 years, the initial trends show the program is correlated to improving retention, teaching useful programming skills and improving a sense of belonging to engineering which have been shown to correlate to improved graduation rates. Further analysis is needed to compare responses across each engineering and computer science discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the truly distinctive elements of a chemical engineering undergraduate experience is working with larger-scale process equipment in a laboratory setting. Unit Operations courses seek to expose students to the type and scale of equipment they are likely to see in industry and to equip them with the ability to analyze the behavior of these systems as well as have a true "feel" for how they work (or don't work quite as expected). For the 2017 survey, the AIChE Education Division Survey Committee focused on the laboratory portion of the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum. Over 70 programs completed the survey, which asked about course structure, hours, and experiments. The typical undergraduate takes one or two laboratory-focused courses within chemical engineering, completes experiments as part of a team, and has at least some exposure to pilot-scale equipment. Virtual experiments make up about 10% of control system experiments and are otherwise relatively uncommon. This paper reports on the survey's key findings as well as some of the highlights of innovative laboratory experience and pedagogy discussed in the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current college students are accustomed to documenting and sharing their experiences through text, photo, and video, thanks to the ready availability of all of these through personal portable devices. The democratization of video production and access has lead to the possibility to both teach and learn with video as never before. This work seeks to capitalize on student expectations and the current technological environment to bring the benefits of both teaching and learning with video into core technical undergraduate engineering courses. Specifically, in this work we ask student teams to create short, targeted, easy to understand videos about concepts in thermodynamics, and then invite them to watch the faculty--vetted library of videos developed by their peers at their own and two collaborating institutions. We are studying changes in students' conceptual learning as a result of participation in this program, and are building a repository of accurate, engaging videos for thermodynamics learning that will ultimately be shared with other instructors and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the AIChE Education Division's Course Survey Committee supervised a survey on how Transport Phenomena and related courses are taught by different institutions. Faculty members from chemical engineering departments who have taught these courses during the 2013-2014 academic provided the responses. The survey, which was conducted online using the software Qualtrics, was disseminated to faculty members by department administrators who were solicited via email. The survey covered topics ranging from course content, student learning objectives, and textbook preferences. In this paper, statistical results from the survey are provided, as well as a comparison with results obtained from related surveys previously conducted in 1977, 1978, and 1987. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses, project plan for integration of conceptual learning in chemical engineering curriculum to develop and promote the use of a cyberenabled infrastructure for concept based education. The major objective of the plan is to introduce chemical engineering faculty to concept-based learning into their classes.

The AIChE Education Division survey committee continues the tradition of an annual national survey to better understand the current state of a particular aspect of the chemical engineering curriculum. In 2013, the committee asked departments about chemical engineering electives. This paper summarizes the results from the multiple choice survey as well as from selected answers to a long-form follow up survey sent to volunteer departments. We defined "chemical engineering electives" as courses offered by the chemical engineering department or faculty that may be taken by undergraduate students but are not specifically required in order to graduate. The word that best fits chemical engineering electives is "diverse". It might be argued that the most clear differentiator among chemical engineering undergraduate programs is the areas highlighted by their elective offerings. Nearly 100 different elective course topics were reported by the 96 programs responding to the survey. The most popular topical offerings are Polymer Science, Bioprocess Engineering, Nanomaterials, and Advanced Transport. Typically, undergraduates are expected to take 2-3 chemical elective courses, although the range spans from zero to 6. It should be noted that the programs requiring zero chemical engineering electives usually require instead "technical", "engineering", or "science" electives in similar quantity to the chemical engineering electives offered by other departments. In addition to the numerical summary results, this paper will also report on department chairs' responses to the administrative question of how topics are selected, integrated, or let go from year to year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the progress of the third year of a CCLI Type 3 project whose aim is to make a community of learning within the discipline of chemical engineering (ChE) concentrated on concept-based instruction. It says that the project plan is to create and encourage the use of cyber-enabled infrastructure for conceptual questions.

Current college students are accustomed to documenting and sharing their experiences through text, photo, and video, thanks to the ready availability of all of these through personal portable devices. The democratization of video production and access has led to the possibility to both teach and learn with video as never before. This work seeks to capitalize on student expectations and the current technological environment to bring the benefits of both teaching and learning with video into core technical undergraduate engineering courses. Specifically, in this work, we ask student teams to create short, targeted, easy to understand videos about concepts in thermodynamics, and then invite them to watch the faculty-vetted library of videos developed by their peers at their own and two collaborating institutions. We are studying changes in students' conceptual learning as a result of participation in this program, and are building a repository of accurate, engaging, videos for thermodynamics learning that will ultimately be shared with other instructors and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]