Open educational resources (OER) can be defined as freely-accessible openly licensed works that can be used for teaching, learning and research. Studies have shown OER to be equally as effective or better than conventional resources (1). The University of British Columbia’s Chemical and Biological Engineering Department has developed a number of OER over the past few years in collaboration with a variety of partners within and outside of the university. This poster will present two of the OER developed for use in a variety of departmental core courses.

One OER developed was open online homework problems on the WeBWorK system. This online homework system, commonly used by many math departments, issues each student a unique set of numbers for a problem. The system provides students with instant feedback and can interpret a variety of mathematical operations, allowing solutions to be formatted in a number of ways. This allows students to collaborate in solving the problem without having the same numerical answer. Problems have been developed in the areas of material and energy balances as well as fluid mechanics, and are now shared through the Open Problem Library (OPL). The OPL is a repository of problems that are openly licensed and housed on GitHub. This online homework fully or partially replaced paper-based homework previously used in courses. This allowed students to receive faster feedback, as well as freeing instructor and teaching assistant time from assignment marking to instead focus on student interaction (2). Student and instructor perceptions of the homework system were collected and these were found to be largely positive (3).

The use of numerical methods and simulation is important in a number of chemical engineering applications. Recently faculty in the department began to use the Python programming language for modelling in the reactor design and process control courses. Python is a powerful open-source programming language that has gained widespread use. A number of tutorials were developed to introduce students to Python using Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter notebooks is an open-source web application allowing users to create and share documents containing text, equations, visualizations and editable code segments. These notebooks were used to supplement tutorials in these courses and guide students through a design project. Student perceptions were collected and found to be generally positive, especially noting that they see the benefits of learning python for their future careers.

The OER mentioned above can be found on the OpenChemE Github page at: https://github.com/OpenChemE

References
1. Fischer L, Hilton J, Robinson TJ, Wiley DA. A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. J Comput High Educ. 2015 Dec 1;27(3):159–72.
2. Lee JS, Verrett J. WeBWorK as an open online homework system in a second-year material and energy balances course. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA). 2018;
3. d’Entremont A, Harandi NM, Verrett J. Developing for and deploying WeBWorK across disciplines in second-year engineering. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA). 2019;