Dr. Reza Barati Ghahfarokhi

My first teaching experience began in high school when our high school math teacher asked me to tutor students and help them solve complex problems. Later on, when I was attending college, I started tutoring math and physics courses for high school students. This experience shaped my teaching philosophy. My approach to student assessment reflects my two goals. First, I thoroughly demonstrate the concept very well using state-of-the-art techniques. I find software with high-quality graphics, interesting pictures, lab utilities, and small experiments to be particularly useful. I try to relate to the audience by starting from what they know and building upon it. Second, I assess the knowledge of my students with in-class discussions, one-on-one interactions, pop quizzes, exams, homework assignments, and projects. I have applied interactive teaching to improve the efficiency of the learning process by achieving the summative, formative, and motivational aspects of these techniques.

In addition to faculty input, and discussions with peers, I deeply value my students’ responses to improve my teaching techniques, which are evolving continuously.



Classroom Teaching

Petroleum Engineering Capstone Design Course (C&PE 628, GEOL 528, and GEOL 837)- Spring 2013-Spring 2016

Petroleum engineering involves a significant amount of teamwork. For this purpose, I strongly advocate design projects involving student groups, which provide vital opportunities to effectively work as a team. Both interactive teaching and team-based learning methods are experienced during this course.

This unique course makes a bridge between these two disciplines and provides the students with an opportunity to interact and collaborate with students from the other disciplines. Students are asked to work on a new set of data related to a new field provided to us by an oil company from scratch as if they are working for a company and are assigned to study a newly developed oil field. Teams of three students, one geologist, and two engineers, are typically selected by matching students with similar performance in their coursework. I and my colleague from the geology department believe that such a combination of team members will leave less room for one to get a “free ride” and makes the team members work together and equally to accomplish tasks in a competitive environment. In addition to a weekly lecture, 20-minute meetings are conducted with each team in the computer lab. During our meetings, team members update us of their progress within the last week and ask questions. Students will also be asked several questions about the approaches and methods that they have taken to solve the problem. Students learn how to use three major software by the end of this course.

Design projects are typically divided into three phases of 1) geologic modeling, 2) simulation of the primary and secondary history, and 3) economic calculations and forecasting for different scenarios. At the end of each phase, students write a comprehensive report. Three top teams are selected and they present their work in front of representatives from the company. All the team members have a role in both reports and oral presentations.



Petroleum Engineering Well Logging Course (C&PE 528)

Prior to teaching CPE 528, I spent a significant amount of time preparing course content and lecture notes. Interactive teaching is the main theme of my Well Logging class (C&PE 528). Students are given reading assignments during the previous session. I typically give a lecture for 40-45 minutes and then I give them an exercise and have them work in teams of three to solve the problem. We go through the exercise for 25 minutes and I randomly ask questions from different teams to make sure that they understand the problem and its solution. Students have to complete a short pop quiz, which is a very trivial question about the subject that had been taught during that class meeting, at the end of every session (5% of the total grade). Students receive 16 HW (25% of the total grade) assignments and one midterm exam (35% of the total grade). The final exam includes 40% of the total grade.



Unconventional Resources Course (C&PE 625/715)

I have developed a new course about unconventional resources, one of only three courses of this type being offered in universities here in the US. This course is being taught interactively in the newly designed computer lab (3108 and 3108A Learned Hall) while students are working on class examples in Excel, Techlog, E-Stimplan, PHDWin, and IHS Harmony. This project-based course has been taught three times by myself so far. A large dataset from the Bakken unconventional play in North Dakota was donated to our class for this purpose. All the examples and projects are designed using this dataset and another dataset from the Chattanooga formation here in Kansas. I trained a very capable Teaching Assistant, Mr. Mustafa Alhubail, while teaching the course to teach the course while I am on sabbatical during the fall of 2019.



C&PE 715/CE895 Water Management and Reuse in Oil and Gas Industry

This course was developed as a result of collaborative work between myself, Ted Peltier, and Steve Randtke from CEAE. The course was promised to NSF as part of the NSF-EPSCoR project on the subject of Water Management and Ruse in the Oil and Gas Industry. In this course, students become familiar with the distribution of produced and flow back water in the country and worldwide, understand different methods being applied to dispose of, treat, or reuse the produced water, learn about water copatability and challenges of disposal and reuse, become familiar with different water treatment methods and work on real-world problems from the industry. A good section of this course is about the environmental aspects of hydraulic fracturing and other oil and gas applications. As a result of my participation in the development of this course, I was invited to serve in a panel that developed the Energy Module for NSF-supported Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E) in the National Academy of Science.



Undergraduate Advising

Interacting with undergraduate students during advising sessions, helping them with their plans of study, and talking to students about their future plans reminds me once more of my main responsibility as a KU faculty. My average meeting time with students is around 15 minutes. I typically spend around 10 minutes going through their plans of study and then talk to them for five minutes about their future, their concerns, and their opinions about their experience taking different courses at KU. I always encourage students to find internship opportunities since internships provide them with hands-on experiences that can be the first step for them to find a permanent job. My involvement in undergraduate research has given me the honor of serving as a member of the Faculty Advisory Board for the Center for Undergraduate Research at KU.

Graduate Advising and Mentoring

My philosophy when it comes to advising or mentoring graduate students is to pay attention to their plan of study, research path, and interests as if I am planning to get another M.Sc. or PhD in petroleum engineering.

My office is always open to my graduate students and I spend a great deal of time in the lab and with students daily. In addition to that, I have weekly meetings with my graduate students. Graduate students are asked to submit a weekly report of their progress on research and submit the report to me the day before the meeting. I always read the report and discuss it with them during the meeting. Students typically discuss their plans for the coming week as well.

I pay close attention to graduate students’ plans of study and identify elective courses across the campus that can help them with their research topic. My students typically take courses in the geology, civil and environmental engineering, mathematics, and mechanical engineering departments depending on their research topics.