(514f) Chemical Engineer for Today and Tomorrow through Curricular Reform

The Chemical Engineering School at Universidad Industrial de Santander is very well recognized in Colombia. However, the Faculty has engaged in a curriculum reform. Why? What to reform? In what directions?

The need for a curriculum reform founds on the recognition of changes taking place in the local and worldwide social environments and in the same Chemical Engineering discipline and professional career.

The local Chemical Engineering is faced to an environment in which employment is temporal, unstable, scarce and the competition occurs in a global market for a country that is not in the main stream of the economy. There are new frontiers in the first world Chemical Engineering science and technology. And there is another relevant local factor and that is that the local established chemical process industry is not growing so that ?nobody is looking for our kids?. There are also internal or university conditions: a 5 years program; 50 courses in total; the Faculty has self-imposed that students should come to take Ch E. courses since the first semester when most of their courses are in science and general studies. Another important condition is that there is a growing demand of young people to study Chemical Engineer.

The traditional curriculum was successful for many years and was oriented toward a world of different conditions: mass, stable and well-paid employment; protected and closed economy; chemical process industry based on traditional unit operations.

The first conclusion is that there is a need for curriculum reform to prepare a Chemical Engineer for today and tomorrow; one that is able to cope with both traditional and new frontiers of Chemical Engineering, because the young Chemical Engineers probably will find a closed traditional environment and an open challenge to build a new Ch E career as discipline and profession.

Such a curriculum reform has to include at least subject contents, pedagogy, assessment, academic environment and rules.

The core of traditional Chemical Engineering has to be preserved as the basis for new developments as well as for traditional engineering; however it has to be expanded to new subjects, at least new in our environment, as are bio, nano and computational engineering. More over, the formation for enterprise and for research and development based on new knowledge should be stressed. For a high competitive world it is also necessary to come back to batch production, unstable state processes and therefore to strength process dynamics and control. This new core of Chemical Engineering has to be supported on strong and modern formation in math, chemistry, physics and biology.

The new directions of the curriculum embraces new scope: from nano to macro scale; steady and unsteady states; traditional and new frontiers of Chemical Engineering science and technology, business vision and an universal perspective.

The experience of the curriculum reform shows that it is already difficult to accept the need for a change and to establish what to change and in what directions. But more difficult is to change the actual exercise of the academy, the attitude of teachers and students toward change, and the reluctance to abandon the already well known to teach what is not really known.

The proposed curriculum brings together contradictory tendencies: new subjects keeping the traditional ones and also giving time to the student to develop an universal vision all of that in the same 5 years program; on the other hand the students are going to be taught about subjects that teacher never took at school; and also students are being formed in subjects that are being actually not applied in the local chemical process industry.

Additional rules and guides are necessary to confront the contradictory tendencies: emphasis on basic concepts instead of completeness; avoids unnecessary repetitions of topics in different courses; courses in and out of subject plan and faculty development.

Of great importance for a successful actual curriculum reform has been the establishment of interchange programs for under and pos graduate students with universities in USA, France and Brazil.