Track: Engineering Education
Abstract
: This work is focused on the strategies used to effectively incorporate PBL in chemical thermodynamics course being taught at the chemical engineering technology department at the Yanbu Industrial College, Saudi Arabia. The course was redesigned to map course learning outcomes with the learning objectives so that essential learning areas could be identified for the purpose to craft a problem statement. From a dominant traditional teacher-centred course, a framework was developed to introduce student-centred learning methodology in the curriculum.
In the student-centred learning section, PBL was incorporated at the 10th week of the course where intention was to cover most course learning outcomes. As a starter, the PBL formed only 13% of the total teaching and learning hours for the course. The multiple-solution problem encompassed the use of energy transformation to solve the real world problem of how to economically and efficiently transport natural gas from far areas to populated cities. The students were handed out a clear format to discuss their learning issues, what they already knew and what were they be doing to attempt and to solve the problem. The timeframe to complete the problem and presentation was one week. It was found that PBL could be used as an effective education strategy for a typical chemical engineering course albeit teacher-centred approach could not be eliminated entirely at associate level.