Transforming Traditional Chinese-Taught Petroleum Engineering Courses into English-Taught Petroleum Engineering Courses to Meet ABET Standards

Abstract

It has been a long tradition, in China, the undergraduate and graduate petroleum engineering courses are taught in Chinese. As the globalization playing an important role in our lives, it has become more and more obvious, in many people's point of view, the education quality provided through those Chinese petroleum universities should also be matched with the international standards, such as ABET criteria. At 2014, the China University of Petroleum Beijing launched a program called the ABET accreditation preparation program. The primary goal of this program is to prepare the ABET accreditation through the transforming of the traditional Chinese-taught Petroleum Engineering courses into English-taught Petroleum Engineering courses to meet ABET standards. At phase 1 of this program, 2014-2015, only two courses (Reservoir Engineering course and Petrophysics course) were chosen to experiment the new concept. Upon the completion of phase 1, the two courses ranked top 5% among all the courses offered by the Petroleum Engineering Department in terms of its popularity among students. Based on the success of phase 1, at phase 2 (2016-now), additional 4 courses were added into this program. Those 4 courses are: Well Completion Design, Flow in Porous Media, Production Engineering, and Reservoir Simulation. This paper provides the lesson learned through the 5 years’ experience of setting up the new norm by fundamentally changing the ways of teaching in an environment where native language is not English. The specific details of "Know-how" through the execution of phase1 and phase 2 are presented, analyzed and discussed. The paper addressed the obstacles encountered within the program, the new teaching methods conducted in those classrooms and student's response to those brand-new English taught Petroleum Engineering courses. The experience obtained through the ABET preparation program at China University of Petroleum Beijing may provide some guidance for those who to pursuit the same goal of seeking international recognition and establishing an international learning environment for their Petroleum Engineering courses.