2017-02-20 Meeting Notes

Date

Feb 20, 2017

Attendees

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 (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

Guests: Jont Allen

Discussion Items

Minutes

• Called to order at 3:05pm.
• The minutes from February 13, 2017 were approved.
• The committee heard from Jont Allen, who described the lab portion and proposed revisions to ECE 403: Audio Engineering. Three proposed changes/updates are under consideration: (1) changing the course description and title for the campus course catalog; (2) changing the prerequisites; and (3) counting ECE 403 as an ECE lab elective for the EE curriculum. Discussion on each point is summarized below.

1. There was concern that the course description did not accurately portray the coverage of topics represented in the provided syllabus. For example, the course proposed description specifies "topics in digital audio, including analog to digital and digital to analog (Sigma-Delta) audio converters", yet these topics could not be found in the syllabus. There was also a concern about the seemingly primary emphasis on loudspeakers and whether this was an accurate representation of the current state of the audio engineering field. A corollary concern raised was whether "audio engineering" was an appropriate title given the content coverage of the course. The committee felt that the scope of the course did not adequately cover what should be called an "audio engineering" course.
2. The prior inclusion of ECE 290 and ECE 473 as prerequisites was justified by Allen as a hold over from a previous version of the course, before he took over as course director. They are not needed. Raginski asked whether ECE 313 was needed, given the discussion and experiments relating to thermal noise. Allen responded that requiring ECE 313 would be too much and that the material needed for the course probably was not covered in ECE 313 any ways. Given that some of the labs require work in MATLAB (or Octave), it was suggested that ECE 311 could be a prerequisite. After discussion, it was decided that the programing competencies required were sufficiently captured by the scientific computing requirement in the EE curriculum and adding ECE 311 was unnecessary.
3. A better accounting of the number of hours in the lab is required if the course is to be considered for ECE lab elective credit. Allen stated that some of the labs are really multiple weeks. However, the committee will need to see this revision before approval.

• The committee voted to not approve the proposed revisions and not approve the course for ECE lab elective credit. Makela will relay the above points to Allen to improve the request for the future.
• The above discussion led to a question of what process the curriculum committee has to oversee course content as it evolves. At what point does an evolved syllabus require revisions to the course catalog and approval by the curriculum committee? Should the committee regularly (every X? years) revisit courses in the curriculum? This will be a topic for future discussion.
• Adjourned at 4:02pm.

Action Items