Modernizing the Chemical Engineering Curriculum Via a Student-Centered Framework That Promotes Technical, Soft, and Tech-Savviness Skills: The Case of Unit Operations

The development of a comprehensive set of skills is critical to succeeding in the increasingly competitive global job marketplace. An emerging workforce with technical, soft and tech-savviness skills is of the utmost importance to address some of the most relevant challenges in the years to come. In the Department of Chemical Engineering at Universidad de Los Andes, we decided to tackle such a challenge by pursuing a major curricular reform where a flipped-classroom approach, a PO-PBL problem, and interactive e-learning tools were developed and tested. The proposed intervention was first implemented in the core course of Unit Operations. Herein, we show that upon intervention, the students’ perception regarding the development of teamwork and people-related skills were crucial to creating stimulating environments where students felt compelled to discuss and put concepts to practice. Additional analysis showed that diverging learning styles appear benefited by the proposed framework.