Courseware for remote learning in environmental engineering

Web-based courseware was developed to complement a postgraduate course on Environmental Management. The online material was designed to allow the students to approach the topic intuitively and interactively in a seypaced mode. Graduate students, including biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers should be able to get a good understanding of the technical issues involved. In order to intuitively understand the effects of the emission and meteorological conditions with respect to the plume rise, a simple simulation program has been developed that includes two different modeling approaches to estimate the plume rise: the Briggs methods Ill for stable and neutralhnstable conditions, and Zhang G Ghoniem I21 model for stable conditions. The courseware was used by 20 students. Students’feedback about the use of this tool was obtained and evaluated by means of questionnaires. The tool will be applied in future courses. A more extended version of the program is being developed and adapted as a professional tool for air pollution regulatory purposes.