Renewable energy class postmortem

The dust has had a couple weeks to settle since my renewable energy class ended. I've finally finished grading all the students' papers and digesting their written course evaluations. I think the news is mostly good. The students gave positive evaluations overall, and their oral presentations during the last class session were quite good. All but one student said they would recommend the class to their colleagues, and the question about whether the technical level of the class was too basic or too easy generated a bell curve suggesting I aimed it about right. There were definitely some criticisms of the class, but they were on the whole constructive. Reading them I felt like they were mostly things I could address successfully if I were to teach more courses at UDB.

The most discouraging outcome of the class for me was in the students' written work. Not a big surprise, given my sense of the level of emphasis given to teaching writing in Central America, but there were some serious deficiencies, even after two rounds of draft papers that I commented on. Here are a few things I keep seeing:

• Plagiarism in many forms. Mostly simple oversights like failure to cite sources of graphs, tables, and qualitative statements in the text, but there were two separate instances of teams turning in papers with paragraphs on end of text copied straight from sources I had little trouble tracking down on the web. Worse, one of the papers was submitted by a team that included three UDB engineering instructors. Come on guys!
• Failure to integrate information from multiple sources into the report. The students were good at chasing down relevant facts and illustrative graphics, but they tend to just stick these things into the report without explaining them or drawing meaningful relationships between the elements. 
• Failure to provide units with data. This one drives me crazy! 187,000 whats?
• Use of significant figures. Make that 187, 418.003 whats.
• Failure to use consistent formatting throughout document. This is somewhat understandable in group project reports, but I should have recommended that each team designate an overall editor to ensure continuity and consistent format.

I've started communications with a couple of fellow gringos with experience teaching in Latin America to pick their brains about these issues and how they've dealt with them. I'm considering approaching the university administration with the idea of a mandatory one-day workshop for incoming master's students (and maybe a similar workshop for faculty) on "how to succeed in grad school" that would address the issues listed above. Many students and instructors have told me they want to go to the U.S. to get a master's or PhD; building these skills would be essential for them to succeed in a U.S. university.

This past Saturday I taught a half-day workshop on hydrogen and fuel cells for UDB renewable energy grad students. It was a lot of fun. We did some efficiency calculations using the H2E3 fuel cell/electrolyzer kit I brought from Humboldt, and went through (well, most of the way through; time ran out...) a fuel cell sizing exercise I translated into Spanish from the HyTEC curriculum SERC developed with Lawrence Hall of Science. The students seemed to really enjoy themselves too. Only one kit to play with, but I did my best to involve them in operating it and doing the calculations.

Sunday Basilia and I went on a bus trip to Juayua in the western mountains. Lots of good street food, some cooler weather, and more elbow room than crowded, traffic-clogged San Salvador.