A New Curriculum to Train Chemical Engineers to Solve 21st Century Grand Challenges

The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield is embarked on a curriculum change project with roll out starting with level 1 in September 2017. The drivers behind the change included the need to modernise the curriculum both in terms of content, structure and delivery. The main objective was to develop a modern Sheffield Chemical Engineer. The study is primarily about investigating the efficacy of the change efforts that have been introduced, to track progress and to determine whether we are meeting our stated objectives. The objectives are in relation to student success, student experience, curriculum coherence and student and staff well-being. Specifically, the new curriculum will be coherent, embedded in design and practice with an emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving, professionalism, ethics and sustainability. It will offer flexible learning environments and pathways to facilitate deep engagement. It will promote and facilitate industry involvement by focusing on both process and product engineering to develop industry ready practical graduates with hands on experience. It will produce graduates who are integrators, change agents and self-directed learners to lead multidisciplinary teams, and be at the forefront of innovation. It will provide exposure to niche research areas built on a strong core in engineering fundamentals. Lastly, it will produce graduates capable of Engineering from molecules by applying systems level thinking at many length scales. We have identified a third year module process design as a significant check point to determine whether some of our curriculum objectives are being met (Patwardhan et al, 2017).