Teaching Process and Plant Design in the Year of COVID-19

This reflective practice contribution presents the lessons learned from teaching plant design using an online flipped format to a small cohort of students in the first COVID-19 semester. These lessons were applied to the online teaching of the capstone design course to a full-sized cohort. The impact of the implemented recommendations on the students' academic outcomes is assessed, focusing on the importance of tracking student engagement in formative learning and encouraging the low-engagers to keep up.

Teaching PSE mastery during, and after, the COVID-19 pandemic.

After more than a year of online teaching resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is time to take stock of the status quo in teaching practice in all things concerning process systems engineering (PSE), and to derive recommendations for the future to harness what we have experienced to improve the degree to which our students achieve mastery. This contribution presents the experiences and conclusions resulting from the first COVID-19 semester (spring 2020), and how the lessons learned were applied to the process design course taught in the second COVID-19 semester (winter 2020) to a class of 53 students. The paper concludes with general recommendations for fostering active learning by students in all PSE courses, whether taught online or face to face.