(372f) Collaborative Writing "Wiki Tool" in a Chemical Engineering Laboratory

This work will introduce a collaborative writing pedagogical tool for use in an upper-division chemical engineering laboratory course. The chemical engineering curriculum ubiquitously includes a capstone course (in either the junior or senior years) characterizing industrially relevant instrumentation, often referred to as unit operations (UOs). This work proposes the use of a Wiki tool to replace student reports, initially for a subset of the UOs. Instead of submitting reports to an instructor, as is typical, students upload their work as a page on the course management system (CMS, e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, etc.), visible to all enrolled in UOs. Subsequent teams studying the same UO provide peer feedback on the original report, validate the data collected, and perform additional experiments investigating the effect of parameters not yet studied; finally, for their final report, they will edit and amend the original document on the CMS with sections related to their study of the UO. It is hypothesized UOs using this pedagogical tool will observe that: (i) the quality of uploaded reports increase, given their responsibility to the next team, (ii) the quality of peer feedback increases, (iii) students gain a more thorough understanding of the UO, and (iv) students understand how to verify others' results. In this poster, methods and preliminary data will be discussed regarding this work currently in progress.