An Interactive Web Native Textbook for Material and Energy Balances

Abstract

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.

Significant reading participation across multiple cohorts before and after the due date when using an interactive textbook

“…D students read 8% more and F students 11% more leading to 97% and 93%, respectively. In summary, significant first‐time reading participation after the due date is likely indicative of students trying to unsuccessfully cramming for quizzes or exams, which is contrary to proven study habits [11,26,36,51]. Reading after the due date likely does not allow sufficient time to form new connections in the brain that could help on exams that make up most of the final course grade.…”

“…Animations combine text and images, which has been shown to be beneficial for learning [8]. Three types of animations include derivations, figures, and actions occurring in process units with examples available elsewhere [30,31,33,36]. Since animations take 30 s–2 min to watch, the chunking is consistent with humans’ attention span measured by billions of video watch data compiled by Wistia [50].…”

“…The primary emphasis will be on findings reproduced across the three cohorts. Reading participation before the due date from the 2016 cohort was previously published [33], and some data from other cohorts have appeared in conference proceedings [31,34–36]. Therefore, aggregated data, comparisons across three cohorts, and reading‐grades correlation after the due date are presented for the first time.…”

“…Each step in an animation builds upon the previous steps creating the final image, figure, or text. Many animations construct figures with explanations of how and why a figure or diagram came to be [30,31,33,36]. Animations combine text and images, which has been shown to be beneficial for learning [8].…”

Why not try active learning?

“…In addition, because more extensive information is available on line, and because internet resources are more up‐to‐date than printed textbooks, textbooks no longer need to be comprehensive references. An example of an interactive textbook for statics is available through the Open Learning Initiative, and an interactive chemical engineering textbook for material and energy balances is currently being developed …”