We are at an exciting and challenging time in chemical engineering education.

A recent Nature Chemical Engineering viewpoint article by six international academics and national lab leaders highlighted opportunities to re-envision the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum. Each expert provided a unique viewpoint on what an undergraduate education in chemical engineering could entail—all agreed that the undergraduate curriculum needs to change. At the same time, both a recent National Academies report on the future of chemical engineering and the Engineering Mindset Report recommended exploring ways in which engineering curricula could be more responsive to scientific discoveries, technological advances, and the needs of our students.

To catalyze these and other changes in engineering education, the National Science Foundation has called on departments to propose revolutionary changes in the ways we engage students, develop their technical and professional skills, and establish their identities as professional engineers. Responding to these calls for Revolutionizing Engineering Departments will require a collaborative effort that leverages both a deep understanding of chemical engineering education and research on learning, student development, teaching, and educational change.

One of the biggest attractions for us, two engineering education researchers, to join the R.F. Smith School was the opportunity to leverage research-based insights into these collaborative change efforts to improve chemical engineering education. We bring expertise and considerable enthusiasm to co-lead change efforts in collaboration with Smith School faculty that set a new example for high-quality chemical engineering education nationally and globally.

Looking back to look ahead

Chemical engineering emerged during the first Industrial Revolution when the energy required to mechanize industry was met by the discovery of oil. Chemical engineers learned how to extract the chemical energy in fossil fuels and convert it into useful commodities that fostered rapid industrialization. Scaling up industrial processes led to the mass production of goods and commodities, enabled by the know-how of chemical engineers. These advances started a period of unmatched human prosperity that continues today. Most recently, chemical engineers have been at the forefront of biotechnology breakthroughs to create vaccines to combat the global COVID-19 pandemic.

However, some chemical engineering innovations have also been responsible for harm including the production of chemicals that will persist in the environment indefinitely, greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, plastic materials that accumulate in landfills and the oceans, and the chemicals of war that have inflicted long-term or permanent damage on humans and the environment. As a result, chemical engineering education has both challenges and opportunities to innovate in order to further efforts toward a positive, sustainable future.

Despite the opportunity to address current and pressing global challenges, the curricula in most chemical engineering programs nationally have not dramatically changed in the past century. Granted, educational innovations have been implemented to change courses or some aspects of the student experience, often in the first or last year of programs. However, the core content, foci, and teaching practices have predominantly focused on technologies rooted in the fossil fuel industry and norms established with the founding of the discipline. We want to expand the industries students are exposed to and modernize our teaching approaches with how today’s students learn, retain information, and integrate their knowledge to solve problems and pioneer the creation of new technologies.

The Cornell chemical engineering curriculum has benefitted students for over eight decades. Its intellectual foundation is well-known and graduates are well trained to see the world as a system of molecules, waiting to be transformed. With the establishment of engineering education research as one of the teaching and research hubs within the school, we, the CBE community, have the opportunity to lead efforts nationally to honor the history of robust fundamentals taught through the curriculum as well as to create opportunities to provide a more modern, experiential learning environment for our students. The greatest challenges of our time, including energy, climate change, biotechnology, and human health, are squarely in the wheelhouse of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The Smith School is embarking on a revolution in how we educate the next generation of chemical engineers, prepared to develop sustainable solutions to these challenges.

Collaborating with you on this exciting road ahead

Engineering education research scholars conduct a wide range of systematic studies that include basic and applied research in teaching and learning practices, assessment and evaluation, student development, and institutional change drawing on methodologies from a variety of fields including education, psychology, sociology, other social science fields, and STEM disciplines. An important feature of engineering education research is the strong role that the discipline plays in setting the priorities for the research and in making sure it is relevant and focused on improving what is most important in moving undergraduates towards expertise in engineering. Cornell Engineering is aiming to take a leadership role nationally and internationally by embedding engineering education research within and across the engineering programs. This vision creates opportunities for learning and collaboration within schools and departments as well as the college as a whole.

The Smith School is at the forefront of this work and has set three foci as priorities in leading in engineering education innovation:

  1. Living Laboratory

    Over the last several years, faculty have been creating authentic learning opportunities for students, connecting their research with their course assignments. The school is now aiming to extend that work by implementing a Living Laboratory Ecosystem from the idea of failure as a learning practice, and that within a safe and supportive environment for failure, innovation flourishes. Within the school, this change will be evident through in- and out-of-class opportunities for students, faculty and staff to engage in cycles of understanding, designing, prototyping, and learning. One such idea will be structural changes to the curriculum that will create opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge across multiple competency areas, including but not limited to, design, leadership, responsible innovation, and data/AI literacy. Over the last year, the faculty and staff have come together to begin to explore these ideas and we look forward to sharing our progress with you over the coming years

  2. Unit Operations Across the Curriculum

    An Active Learning Initiative grant from the Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation will integrate the Unit Operations (UO) laboratory throughout the curriculum. Students in their seventh semester take UO lab and engage in seven labs: total reflux distillation, continuous distillation, pump curve generation, membrane separation, laminar flow reactor kinetics, Aspen simulations of a process, and pumping. The existing UO laboratory course engages students in “cookbook labs” to apply theory learned in courses earlier in the curriculum. While the UO lab is a hands-on learning experience, it requires students to gain all of the theoretical knowledge before applying it. Because of this approach, students may be unable to connect their learning to application, decreasing motivation, retention, and, ultimately, our students’ ability to solve engineering problems. Some might ask, “Why not move the UO lab as it exists earlier in the curriculum?” The scope of experiment types requires knowledge across all the chemical engineering curriculum through the junior year. Students would not be prepared to take the UO course as it is currently designed until senior year. We plan to break up the UO lab experience and embed its hands-on, inquiry-based learning throughout students’ undergraduate experiences. This approach also opens a space to create a new senior capstone design course that engages inquiry-based learning and extends design experiences across a whole year rather than one semester.

  3. A Classroom for Hands-On and Innovative Learning Experiences

    To provide students with more hands-on learning opportunities and faculty with resources to prototype new approaches to teaching, we need learning spaces that are flexible and technologically enhanced. We are targeting a renovation of Olin Hall 245, which is the primary teaching classroom used for most undergraduate courses. The current classroom has tables that can be dragged into small groups, but these tables do not have wheels for easy classroom transitions between direct content delivery and active group work. Additionally, the audio and visual setup in the room provides only one focal point, minimizing the opportunity for diverse seating and teaching arrangements. Envisioned changes include a lab wet bench and storage for safe and dynamic experimental setups, multiple high-resolution screens to provide flexibility in what is presented and how students engage with teaching material, and audio-visual recording options to enable faculty to study and further enhance the learning experiences of the students. More information on how to support this effort can be found at the end of this newsletter or by contacting the school director.

Looking outside of Olin Hall

As part of this initiative to bring engineering education research formally to Cornell Engineering, we are also engaging with the growing number of researchers in engineering and STEM education, including Alexandra Werth in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. This past year, four students began conducting engineering education research as part of their graduate studies, and the community of students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty has grown to 16. Looking ahead, we plan to launch an Engineering Education Research Institute to foster cross-unit collaborations and efforts at Cornell and to share findings, tools, and resources broadly. Building on the successes of engineering at Cornell and leveraging what we know about creating transformative and positive learning experiences for students, we see incredible potential for Cornell to become a model for, and national leader in, engineering education research and innovation.