052:041 preview:
Why take "Material and Energy Balances" on the Web?

• Who may want to take this course?
• What can I expect if I take this course? (features which parallel a "live" course, bonus features which extend virtual course's quality)
• What do students who have taken the course think about it?

There are many reasons to take any course and as many different situations as there are students. This web class is designed to make the course material available to as many students as possible. Types of students who may especially benefit from this course are:

Students who prefer the multi-media computing environment.  An Internet course offers some advantages over the traditional "lecture" version of a course; therefore some students may prefer the Internet version even if a traditional section is available.  For example, the Internet offers convenient access to the course from any location and on any schedule.  An Internet course can be delivered through any computer that has access to the Internet and can be offered any time, day or night.  If you are comfortable using a computer as a primary medium for learning, you may want to consider the course!

Transfer students. Transfer students who plan to attend a four-year institution to major in Chemical Engineering after spending two years at a community college may be very interested in this course.  Transfer students should consider taking this course the summer before entering the four-year institution.  Material and Energy Balances is normally taken in your second year on campus, and is a prerequisite to most of the junior-level courses in the curriculum.  For this reason, this is the most problematic course for Chemical Engineering transfer students, and taking the course in the summer can prevent a lot of scheduling difficulties.

Off-campus students. This course could provide a valuable educational option for students who would otherwise be unable to take the course at all.  Off-campus students, such as co-op students whose work assignment is far from campus or industrial chemists technicians who want to expand their knowledge of processes would fit this category.  The chemical process and problem-solving concepts covered in this course provide a valuable engineering perspective for these audiences.

Students who want to take the course in a term it is not normally offered.  The Internet version of Material and Energy Balances is offered every semester, Fall, Spring, and Summer.  Many universities offer their version of this course only one term a year.  Now you can use the Internet to take the course in a semester that it is not offered in the traditional lecture version.
 

What can I expect if I take this course?

In this web version of Material and Energy Balances the course content is the same as in the traditional lecture version of the course. In addition the pace setout in the course calendar parallels the pace of the one semester lecture course.

Course structure and style.  The students proceed through the course by completing two or three Internet lessons per week.  Each lesson is designed to take roughly an hour to complete and is delivered using voice, text, pictures, simulations and animations.  About every 20 minutes, the student encounters a set of 10 to 20 short answer questions that are designed to reinforce the concepts that they just learned.  Printable transcripts of the audio narration are available for each lesson, and the Web pages are formatted for easy printing.  In this way lessons are structured to support different learning styles as well as hearing impaired students.  We anticipate that most students will find it most effective to use both the audio and the video components; however, students can obtain all of the educational material in the lesson without using the audio.

Group project.  The course includes a cooperative learning group project called the "People Balance Project" in which the students work together in interdependent groups of five, with each group member assuming a different role essential to the success of the project.  This project is designed to enhance team skills and requires the students to find effective ways to communicate with one another from remote locations.

Communication and the virtual classroom.  Several interactive and communication features have been integrated into the lessons.  For example, there are e-mail links to the instructor on every page, and there is a "Webtalk" discussion room that everyone can access and can post questions and comments to the rest of the class and to the instructor.  Each student can customize their "profile" in this discussion room with text and graphics.  In this "virtual classroom" we hope to foster peer-peer interactions similar to the discussions students have with one another after class outside the traditional lecture room.

What do students who have taken the course think about it ?

Personally, I decided to take the web version of 052:041 because I was going to attend the University next fall and it was a requirement for my major, Chemical Engineering. Living several hours away from campus, I would not have been able to attend the traditional lecture version of the course. I found that the web environment is an incredibly powerful learning and teaching medium.  Complicated charts came clearly into focus with a little color highlighting. Unknown words could be looked up simply by clicking on them.  The use of Real Audio and Quick Time added the feel of actually being in a classroom (all except for the feeling of nodding off to sleep).  Perhaps the best benefit of the web-based version of 052:041 is that I was able to take the class on my time, whenever, or wherever that happened to be.  Communicating with the Professor was incredibly easy thanks to email, and he responded quickly.  All in all, I would much rather take this particular course at home sitting in a comfortable chair than be sitting in a hard chair in a classroom lit by harsh fluorescent lighting.