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Minutes

• The meeting was called to order at 2:03pm
• Minutes from September 16, 2015 were approved
• Srikant attended the meeting to answer questions from the previous curriculum committee meeting regarding ECE 498RS
  • Srikant described that Spark was the programming language used primarily for the parallel computing tasks studied in the course.  MATLAB and C++ would be used for portions of the class simulating load balancing, etc.  MapReduce requires both MATLAB and C++.  It would be useful for the students to have programming experience in these languages, so ECE 220 as a prerequisite would be acceptable.  
  • Kudeki asked if CS students (coming in with CS 125) would be able to take the course.  Srikant said they would.
  • Franke asked if the tools being used in the course were common industry tools.  Srikant said yes, especially Spark.
  • Allen pointed out that having multiple programming languages available to the students could cause problems in providing code snippets and in grading the results.  Kudeki countered that a plurality of languages is fine and that one could look at the output of the code as the grading metric.
  • The course was approved as proposed.  A suggestion to consider ECE 220 as a prerequisite was made.
• Makela showed slides (updated to incorporate corrections listed below) describing the current status of the ECE core.  This led to discussion related to each of these courses.
  • Schmitz mentioned that of the 31 lab sections in ECE 110, 16 are associated with students taking the full course.  The other 15 are for students enrolled in the lab only.
  • Kudeki pointed out that Lumetta was the course director for ECE 120.
  • Kudeki pointed out that for ECE 210, the labs were one hour and there were only five labs throughout the semester.  He also pointed out that the lab does not count as part of the grade for the course.
  • Kudeki pointed out that Mitra was the course director for ECE 220.  The single-lecture mode will change next semester and 4 lecture sections will be offered.
  • It was pointed out that ECE 385 should be considered as part of the core and added to the slides.
  • Levinson asked about the status of the "applied" versions of ECE 313 (i.e., the version offered by Iyer).  Kudeki stated that none were being offered this semester, but the course director (Hajek) was not opposed to these different versions being offered.  Levinson asked if there was a problem having multiple versions of a core course being offered, and if there would be problems with different content/quality being delivered in a course we recommend our students take to fulfill the statistics requirement of the curriculum.  Kudeki stated that if they are quality courses and if the course director approves of them, they should be fine.  Levinson stated that the curriculum committee should strongly suggest that these applied courses still satisfy the overall course goals for ECE 313.  Kudeki mentioned that ABET wants different "flavors" of probability for EE and CE majors in the future, and these applied versions may be one way to address this.  Minin mentioned that ECE 313 for EEs was the first practical course in communications, but other EE flavors (power, DSP, etc) could be generated as well.
• The committee then discussed the broader question of course delivery mechanisms.
  • Levinson pointed out that some on the faculty have been advocating "non-traditional" (non-lecture-centric) methods, such as the use of flipped classroom, clickers, videos, etc. Minin described that clickers are one example of technologies that increase student engagement and can help instructors assess student understanding in realtime.  Makela mentioned that it isn't necessary to wholesale adopt any of these new techniques, but that they can be used at different times throughout the semester to engage different learning styles.  Similarly, he pointed out that a given instructor's teaching style may not mesh well with some of these techniques.  Kudeki stressed that the department currently has an environment where individual instructors can deliver material how they see best.  This allows for experimentation and development over time.  Makela stressed that course content and adherence to the course instructional goals needs to be maintained regardless of delivery method.
  • Kudeki pointed out that Tsinghua University, where he recently visited, has looked at flipping their classrooms.  Not all of them are flipped, but the sections that are show that the students perform better in that section.  They tend to be more engaged in the flipped classroom.  However, they have found that those same students tend to do worse in their other classes, presumably because they are spending extra time on the more engaging flipped classroom experience.
  • Levinson asked what the motivation of this discussion was and how it related to the charge provided by Sanders at the beginning of the semester.  Are we worried about addressing the mechanics of delivery (i.e., do we have enough classrooms) or enhancing the quality?  Franke pointed out that one consideration is that some of the delivery methods discussed will not scale to the student body size we have.  Minin suggested that the committee could come up with a summary of different teaching methodologies and when/how they might be best implemented.  This might help instructors choose a given style for a particular course.  It was pointed out that there were several resources on campus in which several committee members were involved.  Varshney pointed out that there was also emerging research in this area characterizing various learning methods.  It was suggested that the committee invite an expert from the College of Education to summarize some of these new teaching methods so that everyone on the committee is working from the same definitions.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:59pm

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