Textbooks are experiencing a 21st century makeover. The utility of the textbook has diminished for the digital natives populating higher education today. The concept behind the Material and Energy Balances (MEB) zyBook® is to have students interact with the electronic book. While textbooks focus on the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, namely remembering and understanding, engineers need the higher levels skills of applying and analyzing to earn an accredited undergraduate degree. The animations and question sets in the interactive, online format provide an excellent delivery of engineering course material. The zyBook format has been successful in other engineering disciplines and now has been translated to chemical engineering content. Data on the students’ usage during the Spring 2016 semester as well as survey responses related to the new textbook format will be included in the talk.
Matthew W. Liberatore is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toledo. He earned a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in chemical engineering. From 2005 to 2015, he served on the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines. In 2018, he served as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His research involves the rheology of complex fluids, especially traditional and renewable energy fluids and materials, polymers, and colloids. His educational interests include developing problems from YouTube videos, active learning, learning analytics, and interactive textbooks. His interactive textbooks for Material and Energy Balances, Spreadsheets, and Thermodynamics are available from zyBooks.com. His website is: https://www.utoledo.edu/engineering/chemical-engineering/liberatore/
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