The use of digital tools in pharmaceutical manufacturing has gained traction over the past two decades. Whether supporting regulatory filings or attempting to modernize manufacturing processes to adopt new and quickly evolving Industry 4.0 standards, engineers entering the workforce must exhibit proficiency in modeling, simulation, optimization, data processing, and other digital analysis techniques. In this work, a course that addresses digital tools in pharmaceutical manufacturing for chemical engineers was adjusted to utilize a new tool, PharmaPy, instead of traditional chemical engineering simulation tools. Jupyter Notebook was utilized as an instructional and interactive environment to teach students to use PharmaPy, a new, open-source pharmaceutical manufacturing process simulator. Students were then surveyed to see if PharmaPy was able to meet the learning objectives of the course. During the semester, PharmaPy's model library was used to simulate both individual unit operations as well as multiunit pharmaceutical processes. Through the initial survey results, students indicated that: (i) through Jupyter Notebook, learning Python and PharmaPy was approachable from varied coding experience backgrounds and (ii) PharmaPy strengthened their understanding of pharmaceutical manufacturing through active pharmaceutical ingredient process design and development.

Flipped instruction in an undergraduate numerical methods course in the online, remote environment during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted with and without the use of adaptive-learning lessons for pre-class preparation. This comparison was made to explore potential differences with and without adaptive software relative to exam and concept inventory performance and student perceptions of the classroom environment, learning and motivation, and benefits and drawbacks. Student perceptions were gathered via the College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI) and a survey designed to capture feedback specific to flipped instruction. The analysis was made possible by a current NSF grant to study adaptive learning in the flipped classroom at three universities and extensive prior research with the flipped classroom and adaptive learning by the authors. Results gathered in the online flipped classroom with adaptive learning suggested positive changes in the following: classroom environmental perceptions, preference for flipped instruction, perceived responsibility imposed, motivation for independent learning, and perceived learning. Furthermore, based on an open-ended question, there was a significant decrease in the proportion of students who experienced load, burden, or stressors in the online flipped classroom when adaptive learning was available versus not. Multiple-choice exam and concept-inventory results were slightly higher with adaptive lessons (although not significantly so), with the most promising results occurring for Pell grant recipients. The emerging medical education literature has suggested that adaptive learning and flipped instruction will be key to post-pandemic education. The present article begins advocacy for adaptive learning with flipped instruction in engineering education.

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has severely crippled our globalized society. Despite the chaos, much of our civilization continued to function, thanks to contemporary information and communication technologies. In education, this situation required instructors and students to abandon the traditional face-to-face lectures and move to a fully online learning environment. Such a transition is challenging, both for the teacher tasked with creating digital educational content, and the student who needs to study in a new and isolated working environment. As educators, we have experienced these challenges when migrating our university courses to an online environment. Through this paper, we look to assist educators with building and running an online course. Before we needed to transition online, we researched and followed the best practices to establish various digital educational elements in our online classroom. We present these elements, along with guidance regarding their development and use. Next, we designed an empirical study consisting of two surveys, focus group discussions, and observations to understand the factors that influenced students' engagement with our online classroom. We used the same study to evaluate students' perceptions regarding our digital educational elements. We report the findings and define a set of recommendations from these results to help educators motivate their students and develop engaging digital educational content. Although our research is motivated by the pandemic, our findings and contributions are useful to all educators looking to establish some form of online learning. This includes developers of massive open online courses and teachers promoting blended learning in their classrooms.

Nowadays, smartphone applications (apps) are literally used in all life aspects, improving the quality of different services in addition to saving time and effort. However, the majority of currently used apps in different universities around the world are limited in their features and not very popular among students who may suffer to get useful information using traditional guiding methods. However, the importance of these apps is constantly increasing, especially in times of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic during which people were forced to work from home and the human interaction was reduced to its minimal degree. In this paper, we present a Student Interactive Assistant Android Application with Chatbot (SIAAA-C), which is basically a personal electronic guide that is used by students to get various and effective academic services. The app has a number of useful features including a campus map, multiple types of notifications, and most important, an efficient built in chatbot that responds to both Arabic and English written queries and covers a wide range of academic topics ranging from basic to complex. Even more, SIAAA-C was designed to have Arabic and English interfaces to be used in the University of Jordan (UoJ), which has one of the biggest campuses in the Arabic area with more than 40,000 local and foreign students. Moreover, SIAAA-C was practically tested in a real-life environment by a group of UoJ students who were selected from different faculties during the pandemic peak period and the feedbacks were very promising, based on the outcomes of an evaluation survey that was answered by 102 students after a 1-month test period.

The COVID-19 crisis is having a significant impact on the quality of life and future of young people; it can also lead to disruption in education. A disruption would pose a severe threat to the entire society in the postcrisis period. Therefore, educational institutions must respond quickly and ensure the continuity of the educational processes. Our research goal has been to develop and implement a model enabling a rapid transition from the traditional to the distance learning model in a state of emergency. Our focus has been on conceiving technical, organizational, and pedagogical changes that educational organizations need to implement to enable different interaction methods, ensure continuity, and provide high-quality education. We have defined and implemented a model, which is described in detail in this paper, thus giving guidelines for a rapid transition to distance learning, which is not restricted to the crisis times only. We have evaluated our approach by monitoring the IT solutions and surveying students and teachers at the School of Computing, Union University of Belgrade. The results indicate the high satisfaction of these participants in the educational processes. They imply the acceptability of prolonged distance learning, if needed, and embrace the hybrid education model for the next generation of students.