HR4RS stamp
Raul Garcia Hemonnet
The pandemic generated by COVID-19 has forced all schools and colleges to adapt and integrate new ways of transmitting knowledge and practicing teaching. Chemical Engineering and its associated degrees, with a great experimental nature, have not emerged unscathed from this methodological transformation.
ESCET teachers have recently organized the 'I Conference on Teaching Innovation in Chemical Engineering', which has served to publicize the methodologies and tools used by teachers in the area to make study attractive, even when they are outside the School and have to a limited extent from laboratories.
"The conference has been very satisfactory, since we have had more than 60 participants and people from universities such as the UCM, UAM, or the University of Vigo, among others", explains the professor of Chemical and Environmental Technology and member of the 'Group Teaching Innovation for the development and application of SIMulation tools in Process Engineering', Raúl Molina, organizer of the event.
Among others, tools have been seen to generate personalized exercises in a practical case, which allow the generation of the case and check that the solutions are correct and also generate a quick correction template. Likewise, as teaching support tools, mathematical calculation programs have been used, which, for example, allowed the development of thermodynamic cases. By changing two or three variables, a concrete case was obtained. “The common denominator was that it was attractive to the student. With friendly and intuitive graphical interface, more visual”.
Living the laboratory, without being in it
One of the most important challenges that degrees with a high degree of experimentation have experienced has been being able to replicate laboratory practices when the use of these facilities has been very restricted due to the health situation.
In this sense, explains Raúl Molina, "we have used and generated videos of facility management, simulation of practices or interactive scripts of practices, with links of interest, videos, infographics, which we have talked about in the conference". In addition, online self-assessment methods and applications have been used, for example in a subject, such as an online book that students have been able to consult, going to the topics that most interested them at each moment”.
The use of this type of tools and methodologies has been highly valued by students in teacher surveys. Raúl Molina makes it clear that this set of tools "constitute support for the teaching work and in no case replace it", the 'I Conference on Teaching Innovation in Chemical Engineering' has served to value all the effort of teachers to the time to try to make the learning process more motivating at a time when students had lost their usual context of work, being confined at home