| The technical side of sustainable development and the environment: Teaching concepts in waste management and materials recovery Brett Cohen, Mary Stewart and Jim Petrie, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering bcohen@chem.eng.usyd.edu.au Chemical engineering students are currently offered a number of core and optional courses which aim to equip them with the thinking required to apply their technical skills in any environment against the background of the concepts of sustainable development. The incorporation of such courses into the curriculum is a relatively new development, stretching back to the past ten or fifteen years at most. Two distinct types of courses are currently offered - those which teach the application of philosophies and tools of sustainable development, and the more technical courses which teach the application of traditional chemical engineering tools towards reducing the ultimate impact of processes on the environment. Such courses include instruction in adapting existing processes to reduce environmental impact (grouped under the broad term 'cleaner production'), and those which teach the design and selection of equipment for the treatment of industrial wastes. In this poster we explore the approach taken to teaching the latter course and discuss our observations with respect to the ability of students to adapt the skills learned in other chemical engineering courses and, in so doing, think 'out of the box'. For the first time this year the use of the WebCT portal was explored in this course with the aim of both encouraging student debate and for the distribution of lecture and auxiliary material. Observations on the success of this trial are presented, and our experience with respect to the limitations of this tool in teaching a technical course which relies to some degree on informal class discussion is presented. Environment and Sustainability in the Chemical Engineering Curriculum: Experiences in the Application of WebCT - PowerPoint presentation |
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