SpoTLLight: Transforming the Chemical Engineering Design Project

The Chemical Engineering Design Project is a capstone subject where students undertake an open-ended, simulated workplace design of a chemical process. Always keen to enhance the subject, Associate Professor Chris Honig sought support from the Teaching and Learning Laboratory (TLL) to conduct a peer review of teaching and radically redesign the student experience.

The result was a dramatic shift in student engagement and satisfaction, culminating in a University of Melbourne student team (pictured) winning the Pratt Prize for best design project among all Victorian universities, awarded by the Joint Victorian Chemical Engineering Committee .

We sat down with Chris to discuss how he achieved this subject's transformation.

What methods or data did you use to evaluate identify the underlying issue and how did you evaluate if your intervention was effective?

As well as looking at the End of Subject Survey results, I spoke with coordinators of similar subjects from other universities at the CHEMECA conference. These discussions revealed that challenges associated with teaching the subject were not isolated but were common across institutions. Looking at student feedback and discussion with other academics, I found that the open-ended nature of the subject meant that the workload was often overwhelming. Additionally, students who were used to traditional knowledge acquisition tasks, struggled with the scope of the project.

To evaluate if the changes worked, the turnaround was pretty obvious through the level of student engagement. Even though I didn't make attendance compulsory, we consistently had 80 to 90% attendance at every single class and students were engaged in the online discussion boards and via emails.  The End of Subject Survey scores improved drastically to potentially having some of the best scores in the Faculty, and the qualitative comments from students were just so positive.

How did you decide what to change and what to keep when you were updating the subject?

When deciding what to keep, I wanted to stay true to the fundamental, open-ended nature of the design assessment. We still need students to function as autonomous engineers who can think critically and justify their own well-reasoned decisions.

As for what to change, we moved away from the traditional, abstract, or made-up projects. Instead of something nebulous like “solve tyre recycling”, we anchored the subject to a very specific, real-world case study: the chemical recycling of soft plastics, based on an actual joint venture being explored by Cleanaway and Viva Energy. We also changed the teaching format, adding in over 20 guest lecturers from industry and linking these to consultations with that guest, to answer project specific questions and provide guidance on their projects.

What supports if any did you access to help implement changes?

Right at the start of the year, I asked to do a Peer Review of Teaching with Greg Bowtell, an academic in the Teaching and Learning Laboratory, and we followed that up with a full Subject Design Review and spent a lot of time having conversations about the goals of the subject and the overall design. Other than that, the big support has been the industry partners themselves who helped by providing resources to support the assignments and time with the students, answering questions. For example, one industry partner - Altera - they ‘zoomed’ in and gave us a real time tour of their plant. You've got the expert from Altera going around showing us their reactor and showing us their quench column and just talking through the specifics.

Which changes do you feel have had the biggest impact on your subject outcomes, and why?

Making the project truly authentic definitely had the biggest impact. We gave the students a real problem that is currently 'in the balance' in industry, and knowing that capital is ready to go if the puzzle can be solved completely changed their motivation. I told the class that I would pass the best reports back to Viva Energy so they could hear the students' insights. It made the work real—they realized they weren't just doing a random university assignment, but actually had the power to help solve a genuine engineering problem.

Do you have any other recommendations or guidance for other academics seeking to enhance their subjects?

My biggest piece of advice is to make the assessment authentic. Base the work on a real problem rather than an abstracted one, and bring in genuine industry experts, because students need to clearly see the workplace relevance of the skills they are developing.

My other recommendation is to push a culture of 'plausible over correct'. Open-ended, real-world projects are massive, and students often get anxious because they are used to rote learning and don't know the 'right' answer. I would tell my class 20 times that their design doesn't have to be correct, but it does have to be plausible. It's unreasonable to expect them to do everything perfectly in 12 weeks when they aren't even graduate engineers yet. Freeing them from the need to be 'correct' allows them to stop getting hung up, make their decisions, and actually progress.