Milo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering. His interests include innovative curricular design and engineering education research. Specifically, his group develops and studies technology-based innovations that are designed to promote higher order cognition, knowledge integration, adaptive expertise and development of professional epistemology. See http://cbee.oregonstate.edu/milo-koretsky Current projects include:

1. The Industrially Situated Virtual Laboratory Project http://cbee.oregonstate.edu/education/VirtualCVD/ The long term goal of the Industrially Situated Virtual Laboratory Project is to contribute to the understanding of how engaging engineering students in authentic, ill-structured engineering tasks enables the development of their engineering knowledge and skills. Over the last seven years, we have developed, implemented, and studied student learning in cyber-enabled learning systems. Central to each of these learning systems is a virtual reactor that enables a team of students to develop, test, and refine solutions to an engineering task. Two virtual reactors have been developed, the Virtual Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Reactor and the Virtual Bio Reactor. Each of these has been integrated into a learning system. We are also assessing the effectiveness of these learning systems by collecting data, including think-aloud observations as the student teams work, analysis of their work products (e.g., notebooks, reports, presentations), and reflections on the experience after they have completed the task.
2. The AIChE Concept Warehouse http://jimi.cbee.oregonstate.edu/concept_warehouse/ Oregon State is the lead on this collaborative project with the University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Kentucky. The goal of this project is to create a community of learning within the discipline of chemical engineering (ChE) focused on concept-based instruction by developing and promoting the use of a cyber-enabled infrastructure for conceptual questions, the AIChE Concept Warehouse. We intend this tool to be used throughout the core ChE curriculum (Material and Energy Balances, Thermodynamics, Transport Phenomena, Kinetics and Reactor Design, and Materials Science). Conceptual questions, both as Concept Inventories and ConcepTests, are available through an interactive website maintained through the Education Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the discipline’s major professional society. The overall objective is to lower the activation barrier for using conceptual instruction and assessment so that many more chemical engineering faculty will incorporate concept-based learning into their classes.
3. The WISE Learning Tool https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/che/WISE/WISE.php?goto=WISEHome The WISE learning tool allows an instructor to pose to the class questions that probe for conceptual understanding and supports a variety of student response types including: multiple choice answers, multiple choice with short answer follow-up, numerical answers, short answers, and Likert-scale surveys. We also plan to incorporate interactive applets. The objectives of the WISE learning tool are to:(1) Provide formative assessment of student learning, both allowing instructors to make necessary alterations and corrections to their instruction, and guiding students where to direct their learning efforts;(2) Form an integral part of the instructional activities themselves, transforming the classroom into a more learner-centered environment; and,(3) Provide a tool that education researchers can use to collect data to understand specific aspects of student learning.