Category → Education
Teaching safety to chemical engineers
Three years ago, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) revamped a long-standing chemical safety program to make it more accessible to students–and now seems to be seeing greater use of the material in classrooms.
For nearly two decades, AIChE’s Center for Chemical Process Safety has been producing 4 to 6 safety modules a year that professors can use as teaching supplements. Part of the Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SaChE) program, the modules cover broad topics such as runaway reactions and risk assessment, as well as more specific issues such as dust explosion control. Universities paid dues to SaChE for access to the modules.
Starting in 2008, AIChE revamped the program to make it more useful and accessible to students. As part of an effort to provide more benefits to student members, the organization started creating two modules a year that students can access independently and directly online, says Lowell M. Aplebaum, AIChE’s manager for member initiatives. Six modules are available to students now:
- Dust explosion control: Introduces background for understanding and preventing dust explosions.
- Inherently Safer Design: Provides information for understanding inherently safer design of chemical processes and plants.
- Safety in the Process Industries: Introduces the application of chemical process safety technology in an actual chemical facility.
- Risk Assessment: Provides an overview of the methods used for risk assessment, management, and reduction with examples and exercises.
- Runaway Reactions: Demonstrate the potential hazards and methods for controlling runaway reactions.
- Chemical Reactivity Hazards: Provides an overview of the basic understanding of chemical reactivity hazards.
Two more will be added this fall. The modules are freely available to student AIChE members (American and Canadian student members also benefit from a corporate sponsorship program that covers their dues). The modules are also freely available to universities with AIChE student chapters.
The modules take up to 6-7 hours to complete and students can start and stop at their convenience. They incorporate video demonstrations, often in an industrial setting, as well as some reading material. If students make it through an entire module and pass a quiz at the end, they get a certificate. In the last academic year AIChE issued nearly 2000 certificates, Aplebaum says. And “the more certificates students earn, the more they’re asking when more modules will be out,” he adds, noting that students are adding certificate information to their resumes.
It’s not just students that have taken notice of the new modules. Professors are starting to add them to courses as out-of-class assignments, with the quiz scores serving as extra credit or even part of a grade.
Laura Ford, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Tulsa, has made two of the modules a required part of the senior labs she teachers in her department. In the fall, the students do experiments mostly with water and air, measuring the performance of pumps or determining friction factors of different pipes. That semester, the students have to complete the module on safety in chemical process industries.
The spring semester lab involves experiments with 10-ft tall distillation columns. For that class, Ford requires students to complete the module on reactivity hazards.
As for the benefit of the modules, “Sometimes the students hear stuff from us but don’t think it’s important because we’re academics,” Ford says. “They think that industry has a different set of priorities.” Seeing engineers discuss safety issues in their industrial environment helps to cement that safety is important, she says.
David Rockstraw, a chemical engineering professor at New Mexico State University, has been using the modules in his classes for the last two years. The quality of the modules is high enough, he says, that he no longer covers some concepts in class and has the students do the modules instead. “There’s so much material to cover that you can’t possibly do it all,” he says, and adding the modules as assignments has freed up a little lecture time to get to topics he couldn’t previously. Rockstraw includes module material on his exams and gives students additional points for the quiz scores.
Rockstraw’s experience using the modules has been so positive, in fact, that his department has decided to require students to complete all of them before graduation. Some students do complain about the out-of-class burden, Rockstraw says, but the sense of accomplishment at getting the certificates outweighs at least a bit of that. Also, students have reported back that the modules helped them feel more prepared for job interviews.
Rockstraw echoes Ford’s feelings that the modules get some points across more effectively than he can in a classroom. “I can draw a sketch or show them a photograph, but when you’ve got a video of someone standing next to a reactor they work on at their company, it’s a lot more powerful,” Rockstraw says.
Undergrad laboratory “safety teams”
As I wrapped up the Teaching Safety package a few weeks ago, I went to put together the resources blog post. When I searched the Journal of Chemical Education for “safety,” I came across a newly published paper that looked intriguing: Safety Teams: An Approach to Engage Students in Laboratory Safety.
The paper, from Seattle University (SU) chemistry professors Peter J. Alaimo, Joseph M. Langenhan and Martha J. Tanner, along with University of California, Merced, research associate Scott M. Ferrenberg, described a unique approach to teaching laboratory safety. I was very disappointed that I discovered their work so late in the game—I would have loved to include it in the cover story. Since it was too late for that, I thought I’d bring it to the blog.
Safety as part of manuscript review
The journal Organic Process Research & Development published an editorial last week on What Is OPRD’s Responsibility toward Safe Chemistry?, by associate editor and Bristol-Myers Squibb chemist Jaan Pesti. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I’ll extract just a couple of paragraphs.
More Holiday-Related Chemistry Fun
In November, I wrote a Newscripts about Diane Bunce’s public lecture and demonstration of the chemical principles of Thanksgiving dinner.
Well, she’s at again. This time, she taught her students a thing or two about making holiday crafts in the lab. Check out this video, also available at the ACS podcast “ByteSizeScience,” for tips on making your own snow globe, bouncy “snow balls,” and marbled Christmas cards. Follow it up by making some chemical Christmas ornaments, and you’ve got yourself a holiday schedule full of geeky goodness.
Thanks again to the wizards in the ACS Office of Public Affairs for sharing their footage.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Revisiting The Premed Curriculum
In today’s issue of C&EN, I have a story about a report called “Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians” from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Association of American Medical Colleges. The report lays out the basic science that premed students should learn at the undergraduate level. Rather than mandating that aspiring physicians take specific college courses, the report proposes that premeds learn a specific set of competencies, opening the door to more flexibility in the undergraduate curriculum.
Last year, Jules Dienstag, a member of the HHMI/AAMC committee and the dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School, wrote a perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine in which which he asked whether students really need a full year of organic chemistry. That question sparked responses at such outlets as the Wall Street Journal’s health blog, Wired, The Chem Blog, Chemiotics II, and here at C&ENtral Science.
Although this summer’s report doesn’t say that students should take a class specifically called organic chemistry, it does require them to learn organic chemistry. The report gives educators the freedom to be more innovative in their approach to undergraduate science education.
For the story, I talked to Gregory Petsko, a member of the committee that wrote the report and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Brandeis University. He had a radical suggestion for teaching the introductory-level chemistry classes (including organic):
“I’d divide the students into groups of 50 and assign each group to a single chemistry faculty member for two years. For two years, that faculty member would teach those 50 students general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry,” he says. The faculty member would have free rein to organize the course any way he or she saw fit, as long as the necessary information was included at some point. At the end of the two-year cycle, the professor would have a year off.
Petsko acknowledges, however, that such an approach would require too many faculty resources to be affordable.
Here’s my question to you, taking a page from Petsko: If resources (financial, people, etc.) were not an issue, how would you teach general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry in a way that was appropriate for all students–premeds and future lab rats alike?
Cal/OSHA Investigates UCLA, Again
(Post updated at end.)
The University of California, Los Angeles, is still under the microscope of state regulators. California Division of Occupational Safety & Health (Cal/OSHA) officials paid the school’s chemistry & biochemistry department a surprise visit on Tuesday, Aug. 26.
Cal/OSHA spokesperson Erika Monterroza says that the inspection marked the opening of a new investigation into laboratory health & safety at the university, although she refused to comment on the details of the investigation while it is ongoing, including what prompted it. California law gives Cal/OSHA six months to complete investigations, although the agency usually takes 3-4 months, Monterroza says.
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German Scandal: Paying For The PhD Title
If you’re a wannabe doctoral student, picking a good topic and supervisor is a pretty important thing, but would you pay thousands of Euros for this?
Germany’s academic community is being rocked by investigations by the city of Cologne’s public prosecutor into a now insolvent consulting firm that connected students with professors at fees of up to €20,000. Professors taking in the students would receive €4,000 for their open door policy–a double payment for supervisory services already being compensated for by their academic salaries.
Now the public prosecutor is investigating over a hundred lecturers, instructors and professors from all over Germany, and from a wide spectrum of disciplines, under suspicions that they received bribes to accept and then graduate possibly undeserving students. According to der Spiegel, it’s the latest investigation in to the consulting firm, (Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung or Institute for Academic Consultancy), whose managing director was sentenced last year to three and a half years in prison for bribing a University of Hannover law professor.
Annette Schavan, Germany’s minister of education, said publically on Sunday that if the accusations are verified to be true, Germany’s academic credibility could be damaged. Um, yeah.
Der Spiegel has got a good piece on the whole bribing backstory here…
Hat tip: Chemistry World
Kindergarten And Crystallography
As my daughter starts kindergarten this week, I thought I’d share an interesting bit of history that I learned recently: Kindergarten’s origins are entwined with crystallography.
Fröbel
Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852) is the man credited with inventing kindergarten. Two things stand out about Fröbel’s career path: First, he became a teacher at the Frankfurt Model School in 1805 and spent the ensuing five years being indoctrinated in Johann Pestalozzi‘s philosophy that learning is better based on observation and hands-on experience rather than in lectures and recitations.
Then, after a stint in the Prussian army, Fröbel spent two years cataloging crystals for Christian Samuel Weiss, learning an early crystal classification system based on the axial intercepts of developed facets. About Fröbel’s experience there, biographer D. J. Snider wrote:
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