Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

This work is focused on the strategies used to incorporate PBL in chemical thermodynamics course taught at the chemical engineering department at the Yanbu Industrial College, Saudi Arabia. The course was redesigned to map course learning outcomes with the learning objectives. From a dominant traditional teacher-centered course, a framework was developed to introduce student-centered learning.

In the student-centred learning section, PBL was incorporated in 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 economically and efficiently transport natural gas from far areas to populated cities.  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 completely.