(395o) Reflective Insights and Lessons Learned While Developing and Teaching a Stand-Alone Chemical Engineering Process Safety Course at the Ohio State University (SP23-SP25)

OSU Chemical engineering curriculum started offering a stand-alone required chemical engineering process safety course from Spring 2023. Prior to Spring 2023, the process safety component of the curriculum was integrated into the chemical engineering design courses. The rationale for having a stand-alone process safety course was driven by feedback from industrial advisory board as well as providing students a distinct opportunity to learn process safety and reinforce it by applying process safety concepts to industrially sponsored capstone projects. I began teaching at OSU in Fall 2022 and was tasked with developing and teaching this process safety course beginning from SP 2023.

The current version of the OSU process safety class relies on a project based real-world case studies analysis approach instead of in-person exams/quizzes to teach students proess safety. The class incorporates elements of AICHE SACHE Modules, Industrially relevant OPEN-PHA software instruction from Kenexis (https://www.kenexis.com/software/openpha/), includes ALOHA-MARPLOT (https://www.epa.gov/cameo/aloha-software) based consequence analysis and also includes communication components to a variety of audiences (chemical engineers and non-chemical engineering).

This talk will present the development and teaching experience of this course and its evolution from Spring 2023 to Spring 2025. During the initial semesters, the instructor faced challenges associated with students tendency to favor "perception of fluency" and "feeling of learning" consistent with those reported by Deslauriers et. al. (PNAS, 2019) while teaching inherently open-ended topic like Process Hazards Analysis (PHA) - HAZOP studies. This talk will initially summarize last years talk (AICHE 2024) that demonstrated and validated with student feedback data a unique co-design of a pedagogical approach with industry (Kenexis) to teach PHA. This pedagogical approach included elements of several educational frameworks including dimensions of Socratic Learning, Finks Taxonomy as well as the "Interactive in ICAP" framework of active learning. :

The talk will then present about the instructor adopting the PHA based pedagogical approach to all of the process safety course. Specifically we will talk about the decision making process and the rationale for eliminating all in-person exams and replacing them with real-world case studies. The talk will conclude with our approach to assessing student learning f outcomes for chemical process safety. We will conclude withreflections on "lessons learnt" which could provide other process safety instructors ideas to explore in their own classes.

References

- Deslauriers, Louis, et al. "Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.39 (2019): 19251-19257.

-Kathe, M., Marszal, E., Bouton, B., & McCoy, A. (2024, October). Pedagogical Framework for HAZOP Education Developed By an Academia-Industry Partnership: Integrating Dimensions of the Socratic Method, Fink’s Taxonomy, and ICAP Paradigm. In 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting. AIChE.