Description
Award Presentation: David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education
Speaker: Matthew Liberatore, Trine University
University students are digital natives having grown up in a screen-based world. At the interface of technology and education, interactive textbooks place students at the center of the learning process. Three interactive, web-native textbooks for chemical engineering students will be discussed covering material and energy balances, thermodynamics, and spreadsheets. By using animations and interactive learning questions, the static and wordy content common for engineering textbooks is avoided. Similarly, auto-graded, randomized homework problems provide formative and sometimes repetitive practice. Both students and faculty receive feedback in real time and accumulate reading and homework scores. While this talk will focus on the interactive textbook technology, many years collecting, analyzing, and publishing research on these textbooks’ “big data” will be briefly summarized. Overall, we hope this talk will inspire more faculty to create and study interactive technologies for engineering education.
Matthew W. Liberatore is a Professor and Department Chair in the McKetta Department of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering at Trine University in Angola, Indiana. He previously served on the faculty at the University of Toledo and at the Colorado School of Mines. Professor Liberatore earned his B.S. degree from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, all in chemical engineering. His expertise lies in the unique rheology measurements of complex fluids as well as engineering education research related to novel uses of technology and big data. He has authored several interactive textbooks with zyBooks and has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles.