(100b) from the Overhead Projector to e-Learning Strategies and Tools: A Personal Journey to Teaching Powder’s Unit Operations over 20 Years

From the overhead projector to e-learning strategies and tools: A personal journey to teaching powder’s Unit Operations over 20 years

Henri BERTHIAUX

Mines Albi has been created in the mid-90’s and is one of the nearly 200 engineering schools in France. Alongside industrials engineering and materials engineering, chemical engineering is a major disciplined that is teach to the students. From the beginning, a special attention has been placed on teaching the unit operations involving powders, since pharmaceutical and agro-food industries for which 80% of the products are concerned with particulate solids, were the main targets of the school in terms of student’s placement. At the same time, a research center, now named RAPSODEE, was build and dedicated to the “chemical engineering of powders”, grouping together researchers and teachers having experience in the field. I was one of them, back in 1996.

While students always appear to teachers as being of the same age year after year, they have changed in many ways, including of course that of the development of computer and connected technology skills. As for anyone, this has forced my courses to adapt constantly to new audiences, and at least I believe so, to improve.

In this talk, I will share my own experience in the teaching of three major unit operations to students in the master level, namely grinding, classification and powder mixing. These three subjects have been addressed as for any chemical engineering’s unit operation. They are dealing with industrial techniques and technologies, mechanisms at play, scale-up rules and correlations, mathematical modelling and so on. Very few schools or universities include powder-concerned unit operations and everything had to be created from scratch, course content and exercises or problems. I will discuss the major improvements to my courses that were brought by both the generalization of laptops in the students’ population, as well as the use of e-learning tools, including:

• Participative, real-time problem solving.

• Role plays

• Video source embedment

• Case studies

• Russian dolls course

• Peer reviewing

• Distance learning

All these need a strong implication of the students, and it will be no surprise to conclude that this holds true for the teacher!