VIRTUAL COURSE FOR THE COORDINATION OF MATHEMATICS CONTENTS FOR THE CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEGREES: NUMERICAL METHODS FOR THE CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AREA SUBJECTS

The University of Cadiz (UCA) has developed the program “Proyecto Europa” with the aim of joining all the actions for the adaptation and improvement of university teaching, facing the new EHEA (European Higher Education Area). Among other activities, UCA set up a call for university teachers in order to propose innovative education projects; the so-called “Development of teaching materials of the subject Numerical Analysis in Engineering for the improvement of the teaching-learning process in Chemical Engineering Degrees” is one of them. With it, a group of lecturers in Applied Mathematics and Chemical Engineering interested in the integration of concepts and procedures of both areas formed a workshop, with the common objective of coordination of the mathematics contents needed specifically by chemical engineering degrees.
The aim of the project is producing teaching materials, specifically, the development of application exercises of the main numerical methods of common use in the chemical engineering area subjects. In a first stage of the project, the large list of topics in the specific area of the numerical methods has been reduced to those commonly used in the different chemical engineering area subjects. In a second stage of the project, a list of detailed application exercises of those methods has been developed with a double aim: its use by the math teachers, who can find examples of real application of numerical methods in chemical engineering, and its use by the chemical engineering students.
In the present work, the virtual course named as MatIQ Course is presented. It has been created in the Moodle platform at University of Cádiz, and includes mainly communication tools (email and forum), modules of content (application exercises), software useful for the development of the exercises and some assessment resources of the usefulness of the virtual course.