ICT and reporting skills in Chemical Engineering Education Jetse Reijenga and Monika Roeling

1. ICT and reporting skills in Chemical Engineering Education Jetse Reijenga and Monika Roeling Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands Summary Our curriculum pays special attention to cooperation and communication skills, especially presentation. We are also convinced that future engineers have the responsibility to communicate their research and technology efforts to a wider audience. During past decades, the tools available for these skills have developed drastically. A recent development is reporting in the form of a website. This website is part of compulsory project work [1] for all Master students and a separate point in the grading system. Our students are thus enabled to broaden the spectrum of communication tools. The resulting websites [2] form part of the student’s professional portfolio and they serve to illustrate new formats of cooperation between academia and industry. Introduction Using the appropriate ICT tools, the need to communicate science and technology to a wider, more general audience has increased. Important improvements in the corresponding skills are required but one should realize that there is a trade-off between three priorities in the triangle of level of detail, interactivity and general audience, as depicted in Figure 1. Popularity of a website, as determined by hit count is just one aspect. Naturally, students are not graded proportional to the hit count of their website. There are many more-or-less obvious criteria, some of them subjective though, for a good website. Guidelines, tips and tricks are offered in excessive abundance, especially on internet. A general starting point is recently given in the 10 Principles of Effective Web Design by Smashing Magazine [3]. • Recommendations • On implementation attention should be paid to following points: • Websites should be in English, targeted towards an audience interested in implications of recent technological innovations. • Some groups assign the task of making the website to the group member most capable of such a task, with the results that the others did not learn from the experience. We try to solve this by having the students include it explicitly in the individual learning objectives at the start of the project. • The website should be graded separately from the report, the presentation and the overall group performance. If not the students tend to make a sloppy job of the whole thing, just copy/pasting the report contents. A (non-zero) weighing factor of the website in the final grade is determined in collaboration with the students. • Even more so than in the case of written reports, students nowadays seem to have a tendency to “forget to mention explicitly the sources of their information”, especially with information from internet. For this reason, we warn the students that we use anti-plagiarism software [4] to check the material they submit. Naturally, we do this after having instructed them how to deal with literature sources, citations and references in a professional manner [5]. • The importance of finding the right balance between quality of the form and of the content cannot be stressed enough. We all realize however, that this equally applies to reports, posters and oral presentation. • Conclusions • By including elementary web design as an inherent educational goal of a compulsory course in the Master curriculum, our students have been enabled to further broaden the spectrum of communication tools. The resulting websites form an on-line data base of past projects and activities and have the additional advantage that they comprise part of the student’s professional portfolio. Furthermore they serve to illustrate new formats of cooperation between academia and industry, and to promote science and engineering education in general. We are convinced that poster presentation and especially web-presentation should deserve more attention in science education. The latter is the subject of the present contribution. Methodology At present, a 1-hour introduction in web design is given on request for those students not familiar with making a website. We use Microsoft FrontPage (included in some editions of Microsoft Office, used on our campus). Frontpage is very user-friendly, especially for those familiar with other MS Office applications. Resulting student project websites are embedded in the educational goals of a compulsory course in the curriculum and highlight the results of a particular activity. The student web pages server of our Department at http://students.chem.tue.nl now contains 89 websites, and new sub-webs are added each semester. Results and Discussion The website [2] has a substantial hit-count, and provides a popular reference for both general audience and secondary school students, as seen from e-mail response to the general contact address. Some of the popular sites are mentioned below. The website of Wondrous World of Carbon Nanotubes, a project initiated by prof. Peter Notten of Philips Research Laboratories is cited most. • In general, the reasons for popularity of any website in general are threefold: • The site has an effective, attractive layout and intuitive and fast navigation; • The content of the site is interesting from a scientific and societal point of view and contains relevant cross-references; • The site is easily found by search engines, by way of proper meta tag keywords in the html code. • References • http://edu.chem.tue.nl/6z020/ • http://students.chem.tue.nl/ • http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design • http://ephorus.com/ • http://students.chem.tue.nl/guidelinescitation.pdf j.c.reijenga@tue.nl - 20th ICCE Mauritius 2008