Content Comparison

...

AY 2016-2017 Members: Michael Bailey, Can Bayram, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Subhonmesh Bose, Weng Chew, John Dallesasse, Peter Dragic, James Eden, Liang Gao, Bruce Hajek, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Kiruba Haran, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Yih-Chun Hu, Seth Hutchinson, Raluca Ilie, Ravishankar Iyer, Erhan Kudeki Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Minjoo Lee, Stephen Levinson, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela (Chair), Sanjay Patel, Maxim Raginsky, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Christopher Schmitz, Jose Schutt-Aine, David Varodayan, Lara Waldrop, Jin Zhao, Zhizhen Zhao, Hao Zhu, Wenjuan Zhu

...

Minutes

• Called to order at 3:05pm.
• Minutes from Jan 30, 2017 were approved.
• The committee discussed the inclusion of IE 420 as a non-ECE technical elective.
  • The general consensus was that the topic list looked fine. Although some of the material could be found in other courses, the approach taken in this course would be different and specific to the topic of financial engineering.
  • The course is technical in nature and can be taken by IE majors; thus, it qualifies under the committee's definition of a non-ECE technical elective.
• The committee approved IE 420: Financial Engineering as a non-ECE technical elective.
• The committee discussed the proposal to have the revised ECE 403 course count as an ECE Laboratory course.
  • Questions were raised about the number of labs (7) being too low to justify being included on the list. If some of the labs are multi-week, the required number of lab contact hours could be satisfied. Alternately, more labs could be added.
  • A concern was brought up about how dependent the labs were on the specific content covered in the lectures. If the content changes slightly depending on who is teaching the course, would the labs have to change as well? Or, is the content going to be static regardless of instructor?
  • Echoing a question from the previous discussion of the course, the implications of removing the ECE 290 requirement without replacing by either ECE 120 or ECE 220 are unclear. However, it is unlikely that students would fulfill the ECE 310 prerequisite without having also taken ECE 120 and/or ECE 220, so this point may be moot.
• The discussion was tabled until these questions/concerns could be relayed to the course director for consideration. The course director should be present at the next meeting this course is discussed.
• The committee discussed the slides presented on the topic of subdisciplines in the curriculum.
  • The curriculum is quite rigid and prescribed at the lower levels and becomes quite open in the last several semesters. In some sense, the sub discipline descriptions should be useful to guide students through course selection at the higher levels. Yet, as presented, this goal may not currently be achieved.
  • An argument was made about balancing breadth and depth or course selection. If students are to be life-long learners and develop their technical skills throughout their careers, breadth may become more important to provide a solid and broad foundation for a career.
  • The relevance of sub disciplines and courses to student's careers/next steps needs to be emphasized. Ideally, the descriptions of sub disciplines would help advisors and students shape course selections with this in mind. The combinations of courses students can take here are vast, making this a Herculean task.
  • There is a difference between listing the courses that are related to a sub discipline (e.g., all of the courses related to circuits) and describing a logical (and feasible within constraints on number of electives) progression of courses to take if you are interested in a specific topic/industry. Perhaps, the description of the curriculum needs to decouple these competing viewpoints?
• The meeting was adjourned at 3:51pm.

Action Items