Page 146 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Innovative teaching, rather than traditional recall or rote learning, is pivotal to effective skills-based learning, and is an important skill in Chemical Engineering studies, which requires students to design and conduct experiments, collect relevant data and interpret the collected data in a scientific manner.
Introduction
Student assessment is crucial in evaluating the performance and growth of each student, to further strategise necessary steps to improve teaching and learning and to share information with appropriate accreditation bodies (Killpack & Fulmer 2018). Recently, professional bodies have emphasised graduate attributes (GA)-based assessments. Graduate attributes are defined as those qualities, skills and understandings a graduate is to have acquired during the qualification. These attributes include the corrective skill or technical know- how that has traditionally formed the fundamentals of most university modules and the qualities that ensure that graduates are ready to act as agents of good conduct in an unknown future (Wong et al. 2021).
Innovative teaching, rather than traditional recall or rote learning, is pivotal to effective skills-based learning, and is an important skill in Chemical Engineering studies, which requires students to design and conduct experiments, collect relevant data and interpret the collected data in a scientific manner. This research requirement forms the core of the Engineering Council of South Africa’s (ECSA) Graduate Attribute 4 (GA4), which is included from the first year of a student’s Chemical Engineering studies. It is the experience of the lecturers that many undergraduate students encounter difficulties with experimental design as it is a complex process.
Connectivism has been described as a learning theory suitable for the digital age, which allows flexible learning (Siemens 2005). In order to teach GA4, lecturers integrated Design-Expert® software into the CELCHB3 module (Reaction Kinetics), using it to measure experimental design. The module is an exit-level (NQF 7), third-year module in the Bachelor of Engineering Technology (BEngTech) programme at UJ which assesses students’ achievement of GA4.
Design-Expert® is a Windows-based programme with numerous potent Design of Experiment (DOE) tools. For example, Design-Expert® incudes response surface methods, Taguchi design, general factorial design, mixture two-level factorial screening, design, etc., to design and analyse laboratory experiments (Montgomery 2006; Lu 2011).
In a study by Lu (2011), the software was used by students to design and analyse their experiments, resulting in an improvement of the overall quality of the laboratory experiments. In an evaluation of the perceptions of students who used Design-Expert® to design, conduct and analyse experiments, Lu found that third-year undergraduate students had: