Large Changes in the Okstate Unit Operations Lab

Student reviews of the OKState Unit Operations Laboratory courses were very favorable. Regardless, and working alongside members of the Teaching and Learning Center, ChemE instructors made very significant changes to the 2-semester courses. Those changes were spurred, in part, by an industrial perspective of the courses and the students. Among those changes were the following: Outlawing of in-lab cell phones, more experiments for each student, individual testing after every group project, anonymous peer reviews at the end of each course; integrations with lecture courses; purposely covering topics not covered in lecture courses; shelving of experiments with high cost-to-benefit ratios; assigning experiments in advance of lecture class instructions; longer and more diverse oral reports; shorter written reports; focusing on working equations as opposed to differential equations - and - initiation of a somewhat controversial “Never Ever List.” Of course, evaluations of these changes led to changes in the changes.