Challenges and discovery of best practices for teaching food engineering to food science majors—My experience over my first 5 years at the University of Kentucky

The shock of a very poor teaching evaluation in my first year of teaching food engineering to food science students at the University of Kentucky caused me to re-evaluate my approach to teaching. Discussions with my colleagues across the country at other U.S. universities, who teach the same course, made me realize that my experience is not peculiar to me or my university. In the next 4 years, I introduced several changes to the course that made me feel that I might have cracked some kind of code for teaching food engineering because my teaching evaluation improved by almost 40% over the last 2 years. Beyond my course evaluations, there is tangible evidence that student satisfaction at the end of the course has improved. I now receive complimentary comments instead of a sigh of relief that many students expressed previously, and some have commented in their other food science courses that my class was really helpful to them in understanding some other aspect of food science. In this letter to the editor, I attempted to share my experience.

Food engineering is a compulsory course for all food science students in all Institute of Food Technology (IFT) approved food science programs. Professors who teach food engineering to food science students are faced with the difficult task of making the course amenable to the students who seem to dislike any course with substantial mathematics and physics content. As a new faculty in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering at the University of Kentucky, one of my primary responsibilities is to teach food engineering to our food science students. This letter summarizes my experience over the last 5 years. The course was poorly perceived by students in my first year of teaching, but numerous changes resulted in overwhelmingly positive responses in my fourth and fifth year. A quick point to note is that this problem has some historical perspective. It is a generational problem that substantial efforts have been made by colleagues across the United States and beyond to tackle and address (e.g., Gulati & Datta, 2013; Hartel & Adem, 2004; Singh, 2015). A lot of the interventions introduced include computer-aided food engineering, mathematics intervention, course demonstration on key topics in short videos, animation of some key food engineering concepts, and the development of virtual laboratory (Gulati & Datta, 2013; Hartel & Adem, 2004; Niranjan, 2016; Saguy, 2016; Singh, 2015). These efforts have yielded some improvements in programs where they have been implemented like mine. However, my experience, which is shared by many of my colleagues who currently teach food engineering to food science students, indicates that we still have more ground to cover. This letter and the supplementary exposé paper are intended to spark a further discussion on what else we need to do be doing to improve the delivery of a required course to our food science students in order to achieve a better experience for all involved—for students, professors, and future employers.

The first thing I tried to do was understand exactly what the problem was with the course. One obvious issue is that many food science students do not seem comfortable and sufficiently well prepared with enough base mathematics and physics knowledge to handle the level of difficulty of the content in the food engineering course (Hartel & Adem, 2004). The second thing I realized is that our students learn differently today because of early exposure to technology, they tend to have a short attention span and learn better with a visual demonstration than word explanation or presentation. Technology, which is the reason most of these students become a visual learner, is also a major cause of distraction in the class. Many students admit to using their cellphone or other electronic devices in the classroom to do other things other than learning during class (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Mendoza, Pody, Lee, Kim, & McDonough, 2018). Every year that I have taught food engineering, students complained that the course textbook I use is too difficult to understand and not simplified enough. This may point to the need to improve how food engineering textbooks present concepts. The textbook I use, in my opinion is the gold standard and the most simplified textbook for food engineering out there, but still, it may need some simplifying to be amenable to the students it serves. There is also the fact that there are insufficient resources to help deliver food engineering course in a way students can learn the content easily. These include things like simplified demonstration tools and several options of the virtual learning environment. It may be high time to write another food engineering textbook that will be at the level of maths and physics a lot of the students come into the course with. Also, it seems the students respond better to an interactive teaching method more than the traditional soliloquy that some of us were taught (Wong, Connelly, & Hartel, 2010). They tend to respond better to dialogue and engaging teaching approach than someone just talking at them. There are other general issues to learning that are not peculiar to food engineering course delivery alone that I realized and attempted to address. For example, students’ general attitude, students preparedness for class, time management skills (ability to organize and prioritize important things during the semester), professor's lack of formal training to teach college-age students, the importance of continuous improvement and application of universal design (emotional intelligence) in addressing students disability needs.

In my second year, I decided to take steps to address some of the identified problems. The first thing I did was to apply to be a part of a year long training by my university's learning center. The training included an introduction to different modern teaching and learning techniques, such as blended and flip-classroom, active learning, use of technology in teaching, universal design, student-centered teaching approach, among others. I implemented some of this new knowledge in my class the following year. Some of the changes I implemented include active learning where I introduced the use of a teaching app called TopHat to administer a daily quiz, encouraged group work and discussion, and used peer evaluation. I also realized that repeating content helps comprehension. So, as a rule, I teach content at least three times—I provide an outline and a detailed overview of a topic, I teach the main content of the topic and provide a comprehensive summary of the last class before I start teaching a new class. I make a conscious effort to understand every student's needs and commit time, resources, and accommodations that allow every student to learn at the same level as their peers irrespective of their limitations. I increased the number of questions solved in class and the number of tutorial classes taught during the semester to walk the students through steps of solving food engineering problems. I was very open at the beginning about the level of difficulty of the course, promised the student my support and shared the testimony of some of my previous students who attested to how my food engineering class is helping them in their career as food scientists. I simplified some aspects of the course that have portended problems in the past—I removed all equation derivation, except in a few situations where they are unavoidable. In my third year, I began to teach as a guest lecturer in the freshman “Introduction to Food Science” course on a topic titled “Introduction to food engineering,” just to expose the students to food engineering early in order to cushion the shock of the requirements in the course when they eventually enroll in my class their junior or senior year.

A lot of the issues observed and some of the approaches I pursued to address the course's perceived problems that are presented in this article have not been scientifically assessed for food engineering. Even though they are evidence-based practices informed by my personal experience, the response from the students, and comments by colleagues who teach food engineering to food science students. It is high time we pursued a scientific approach to understanding the core problems, test proven tools, engage the actual students who are the end receiver of the knowledge being delivered, and device practical means to address this perennial problem in food engineering course delivery. My hope is that this letter and attached supplementary article will stimulate more discussion and engagement in formulating practical means that will solve this problem.

For readers who are interested in reading the full exposé paper, it is available through the Supporting Information link below.