Guangming Daily：School of chemistry and chemical engineering of Hubei University: Innovative training of Chemical talents with Reforms from Three Aspects

Author: Wang Kai, Zhang Xiuhua, Li Ling    Source: Guangming Daily

Released on: 2021/11/02                  

 

As one of the key manufacturing industries affecting the national economy and the people's livelihood, the chemical industry has penetrated into all fields of national economic development. Besides, chemistry is one of the important basic disciplines that serve the national strategy. In order to improve the training quality of chemical talents and meet the new requirements of the chemical industry for talents, the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Hubei University takes the improvement of basic courses of chemistry, practical teaching methods and teaching staff as the starting point, and adopts the collaborative innovation of three curriculum reforms，three practical teaching reforms and four teaching staff reforms to effectively transfer knowledge to ability, realizing the innovative reform of talents training of chemical and chemical engineering.

 

Problem-oriented Reform for Cultivating Talents

with Top-level Design

In order to solve the problems of weak theoretical foundation and lack of engineering awareness and innovative practice in talent training, the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Hubei University put forward the concept of “take ideological and political education as the spirit and professional ability as the foundation”, and took the four aspects namely curriculum ideological and political construction, information-based teaching, practical teaching upgrading and teacher team construction as the implementation of solving problems, focusing on the basic chemistry curriculum, chemical and chemical practice teaching and teacher teaching team.  In addition, with the help of national and provincial teaching and research projects such as “exploration of diversified and digital teaching of inorganic chemistry combined with industry, university and research and training mode of innovative talents”, “reform of analytical chemistry teaching content and curriculum system based on industry university cooperative education”, “exploration and practice of transformation and upgradation of chemical and pharmaceutical majors in local comprehensive colleges and universities” and “reform and construction of practical teaching of chemical and pharmaceutical majors in local colleges and universities for new engineering”, the reform and practice of chemical engineering talent training proposed three curriculum reforms，three practical teaching reforms and four teaching staff reforms.

 

Implementing three curriculum reforms

The training of chemical and chemical engineering professionals is based on four basic chemical courses. According to the talent training requirements of the school's integration of science and engineering to strengthen foundation, the basic curriculum reforms is implemented in three aspects: introducing engineering education certification standards into the science syllabus, penetrating curriculum ideological and political cases into the theoretical and practical teaching, and deepening the teaching information means for the teaching evaluation and management. By doing so, engineering education certification standards, ideological and political curriculum, and information-based teaching methods can be transferred to the construction of basic courses, so as to transform knowledge into ability and improve the quality and efficiency of chemical personnel training.

 

1. Introducing engineering education certification standard into science syllabus

The school introduces the professional certification standard of engineering education into the basic courses of chemistry and chemical engineering, realizing the integration of science and engineering, standardizes teaching, and improves the teaching quality and level of basic courses of chemistry and chemical engineering. 

The content of construction of “three levels” basic curriculum outline is reflected in the standardization of curriculum objectives and teaching content as well as the quantification of assessment and curriculum quality evaluation.

 

2. Penetrating curriculum ideological and political cases into the theoretical and practical teaching

In order to implement the fundamental task of strengthening moral education, the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has carried out the “three mode” Course Ideological and political teaching, integrating related curriculums into theoretical teaching. First, to explicit ideological and political education, the school arranges diversified group tasks in teaching, and cultivate students' spirits of innovation and teamwork as well as realistic and pragmatic quality through the inquiry of tasks. Second, the school applies online resources of MOOC and WeChat official accounts to fully integrate ideological and political elements into the class, enabling students to expand their reading by fragmented time, and imperceptibly influencing the ideological and moral education, so as to achieve implicit education. Third, the school systematize Ideological and political elements mainly relying on the course of chemical history and taking the clue of time development and chemical branch system, and adopts a self-made way where teachers and students jointly build an ideological and political element library to realize the goal of education through synergy.

 

3. Deepening the teaching information means for the teaching evaluation and management

Considering students’ habit of mobile reading, the school creates a WeChat official account in combination with a learning software named Xuexitong to build an information teaching platform, which meet students' needs for information learning for class and promote fragmented learning. It also establishes SPOC courses in a self-building way, with the resources from MOOC of Chinese universities and university course center, to enrich information learning resources.

 

The school activates the modern classroom at the teaching end, and makes full use of the functions of “voting”, “group task”, “Questionnaire”, “theme discussion” and “scoring” in the Xuexitong of teaching wisdom to interact with students, so as to create a modern information technology assisted teaching classroom; at the service side, it enriches the intelligence functions of providing real-time intelligent teaching services, teaching supervision, online exercises and other intelligent functions by the official account.

 

 Carrying out Three Practical Teaching Reforms

The School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering analyzes the factors that affect the cultivation of engineering ability from the perspective of basic experiment, practice and training involved in the cultivation of science and engineering talents, and derives the upgrading and transformation of practical teaching process from upgrading measures of three practical teaching reforms, namely the engineering of experimental and practical teaching materials, the mitigation of engineering equipment and virtualization of practical training, to enhance the role of engineering ability in practical teaching.

 

1. Engineering of Experimental and Practical Teaching Materials

To deal with the lack of engineering elements in the experimental practice teaching materials and the insufficient connection between cases or examples and the actual production, the school puts forward the “three requirements” for the construction of engineering teaching materials: first, the content of the textbook should include ideological and political education, which is combined with experimental and practical cases that bridge the scientific spirit and characters, stimulating students' great ambition to study for the rise of China; second, production cases should be taken as the main body to experiment with the practical cases related to the production and service of enterprise products; third, engineering research should be added into materials, which means to connect articles or patents related to engineering research such as technology and equipment, or incorporate teachers' research results into practical teaching, so as to improve students' learning interest and cultivate their innovation ability.

 

2. Mitigation of Engineering Equipment

In view of the separation of traditional experimental teaching from production practice and the lack of engineering training elements, the school puts forward two methods to transform the experimental device, so that the chemical experiment contains the characteristics of engineering training. One is the application of the self-made instrument. Combined with the practical teaching situation of chemical experiment and professional experiment, the self-made instruments independently designed by the school, which have obtained the practical patent and the achievement award of self-made experimental teaching instruments of colleges and universities in Hubei Province, are introduced into the experimental teaching. This move innovates the engineering integrated equipment and improves the practical effect of engineering education, becoming an important solid foundation for the cultivation of engineering students' engineering ability. The other is the integration of engineering training and experiments. By revising the experimental scheme and using lightweight self-made instruments, the unit operations such as vacuum feeding, reflux, concentration and crystallization corresponding to the actual production are effectively integrated, so that the production operations that match the industrialization can be implemented in the laboratory, which can be applied to the process of chemical and chemical engineering experiment, cultivating the engineering consciousness and ability of students.

 

3. Virtualization of Practical Training

The practice of chemistry and chemical engineering mainly includes cognition practice and production practice. The practice process is often completed on the site of the enterprise where students can only watch instead of operating. For areas with high cleanliness or risk, students are unable to carry out field practice, resulting in defective practice and training. In order to solve these problems, the college puts forward the practice mode of combining virtual and real simulation with “three links”. First, link production simulation with projects. The school selects or designs appropriate products as project materials in combination with the characteristics of the major, so that students can immerse themselves, entering the workshop, picking up materials and ingredients, operating valves and pipe fittings and recording the production process. They can experience the production scene, and apply the learned knowledge to virtual production to achieve the purpose of engineering ability training. Second, link courses with simulation practice. The college has set up simulation practice courses or comprehensive training courses to better help students understand the whole process of pharmaceutical and chemical production by aid of simulation software. The quality evaluation standard of virtual simulation teaching makes the practice evaluation more purposeful. Third, link virtual simulation with the platform. The school presents the production workshop with three-dimensional technology and endows it with the characteristics of immersion, interaction and imagination, 形成具有交互效能多维化的信息环境。forming an information environment with multidimensional interaction.

 

Conducting Four Teaching Staff Reforms

Teachers are the shapers of human soul and the inheritors of human civilization who carry the significant task of spreading knowledge, ideas, truth and life. Teachers are also the specific implementers of talent training and the quality of the faculty is an important factor that affects the goal of talent training. The school has conducted four teaching team reforms to provide a solid guarantee for the ideological and political construction of basic courses, information-based teaching and the upgrading of practical teaching.

 

Institutionalization of responsibility. The University and the college have successively issued a series of documents, such as Regulations on the Construction of Teaching Team of Hubei University, Regulations on the Construction of Undergraduate Teaching Team of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Hubei University, and The Reward Regulations on Excellent Teaching Achievements of Hubei University. Through the establishment of rules and regulations, the responsibilities, rights and interests of the teacher team are clarified for the construction and development of the teaching team, which encourage teachers to actively participate in education and teaching.

 

Integration of Faculty. The school integrates science and engineering disciplines to achieve the leapfrog development of “new engineering”, and then constructs an integrated teaching team for chemistry and chemical engineering discipline to serves the education of chemistry and chemical engineering, so as to meet the needs of disciplinary development, and realize the cultivation of interdisciplinary innovative practical talents.

 

Guidance from Top Teachers. The school gives full play to the exemplary role of national top teachers and Hubei Provincial and school-level famous teachers of petroleum and chemical engineering education, gathering strength to drive the teaching team to move forward constantly and providing continuous guarantee for the cultivation of chemical and chemical engineering talents.

 

Professionalization on young teachers. Young teachers are the future and hope of the university. The overall quality of young teachers bears on the future discipline construction level and talent training quality of the school. The school makes great efforts to train young teachers, giving full play to the role of backbone teachers and old teachers to convey knowledge, to assist young teachers and to lead the better education, and focuses on training young teachers in combination with the “two practice and two designs” of engineering practice. Only by systematic learning and obtaining the “internship report” and “design works” inspected by the third party can young teachers meet the corresponding requirements and “graduate”, hence effectively improving the professional level of young teachers' teaching ability.

 

Based on the national strategy, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Hubei University has carried out a number of measures to strengthen the foundation and emphasize practice under the guidance of casting the soul and consolidating the root, and has achieved a series of teaching achievements. The above reforms and practice of chemical and chemical engineering personnel training mode has realized the integrated development of science and engineering, providing beneficial reference for the reform of chemical and chemical engineering talents training in comprehensive colleges and universities.

(Source: https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2021-11/02/nw.D110000gmrb_20211102_4-09.htm）