Attending
Arijit Banerjee, Yuliy Baryshnikov, Ujjal Bhowmik, Simeon Bogdanov, Zuofu Cheng, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Ravi Iyer, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Erhan Kudeki, Steve Lumetta, Shaloo Rakheja, Umberto Ravaioli, Chris Schmitz, Jonathan Schuh, Yang Shao, Ilan Shomorony
Time and Place
Monday, August 24, 2:00pm, https://illinois.zoom.us/j/112267137
Charge to the Committee
The Curriculum Committee exists for two reasons:
- Shared governance. Committee members are a channel of communication between their Area Committees and the Department Head. They should ensure that each area is aware of, and contributes to decisions about new temporary and permanent courses, technical electives, and advanced computing electives, and changes to the common core.
- Identifying and managing friction points. If, e.g., lower-level courses provide inadequate preparation, or students have inadequate hours, the Curriculum Committee helps to find a maximum-utility solution. On rare occasions, this may involve re-structuring the curriculum; more frequently, it requires minor adjustments.
Old Business
- Discussion/approval of actions taken on the committee's behalf: AE 199 SAT was approved for Technical Elective credit for 1st-year and 2nd-year students only. https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2020/fall/AE/199. Status: Four committee members spoke in favor, none opposed, no formal vote taken.
New Business
- What should be the Curriculum Committee's role in supporting faculty for effective remote and mixed-mode learning?
Points raised during discussion:
ECE 120 recently flipped the classroom. Ujjal Bhowmik and Kiril Levchenko should report on student reactions later in the semester.
Faculty who taught during summer were asked to share relevant experiences. Student attendance during lecture ranged from 1-3 up to 30, depending on whether "participation" was announced as part of the grade. Office hours were sometimes more heavily attended than lecture; some students were very active (options include zoom and online town). It is useful to check the video logs (echo360 or mediaspace), and to send e-mail to students who have never watched a video, to make sure that they don't fall through the cracks. Getting students to show their faces on video might help to encourage a sense of community, and might help the instructor to deliver lectures more fluently; the only method that has been demonstrated to encourage students to turn on their video is an open discussion, during lecture, about the relative benefits to the class of videos on vs. off.