2015-09-30 Meeting Notes

Date

Sep 30, 2015

Attendees

AY 2015-2016 Members: Jont Allen, Can Bayram, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, John Dallesasse, Arne Fliflet, Patricia Franke, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Kiruba Haran, Yih-Chun Hu, Nam Sung Kim, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Yi Lu, Jonathan Makela (Chair), Serge Minin, Chandrasekhar Radhakrishnan, Maxim Raginsky, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Christopher Schmitz, Jose Schutt-Aine, Paris Smaragdis, Lav Varshney, Shobha Vasudevan, Venugopal Veeravalli, Lara Waldrop, Hao Zhu

Discussion Items

Minutes

• The meeting was called to order at 2:06pm
• Minutes from September 23, 2015 were approved.
• Choudhury attended the meeting to discuss his proposed permanent course, ECE 434: Mobile Computing & Application
  • The course takes a top-down approach, examine past mobile applications/products by dividing them into building blocks, examining the individual blocks, and understanding how they are put back together to build a complete system.  This process of understanding how different techniques are brought together to form an overall application is not unique to mobile computing, and can be extended to other type of application spaces.  However, the specific knowledge domain for this course is the mobile computing space.
  • Kudeki asked how many students have enrolled in the 498 version of the course and what the expectations are, moving forward.  Choudhury replied that the bottleneck is the number of devices that can be made available for the students to develop on.  The devices come from his lab, and currently limit the enrollment to 40-50 students.  
  • Choudhury reported that there has been significant interest in the course from CS students, justifying the cross listing request.
  • Makela asked how this course, containing a design project at the end, fit in with other design courses in the department, specifically ECE 445.  Kudeki followed on by asking if this could serve as a course to satisfy the capstone design requirement for CE students.  CE is examining alternate ways for students in that curriculum to fulfill the capstone design requirement.  The proposed course might end up being an option, although it would not fulfill the advanced composition requirement, like ECE 445 does.  Choudhury replied that he would look into this and discuss it with CE faculty.  Hu mentioned that the proposed course has been discussed within the CE area as a potential capstone course.  Hu further stated that to meet the requirement, the projects in this course would need to be fully documented.
  • Makela asked about the learning objectives for the course.  Choudhury stated that the students should gain experience with integration of different topic areas and the challenges in doing so.  Students should also gain the ability to pick up and use toolkits, applying them to specific problems.  Kudeki pointed out that a formal set of learning objectives and how they line of with the ABET a-n objectives would need to be developed for this course.
  • Minin stated that some of the content in ECE 420 is moving toward mobile computing space, and wondered how a project in the proposed course would be different from a DSP project undertaken in ECE 420 on a mobile platform.  Choudhury replied that the projects in the proposed course were not limited to focusing on DSP topics, but could address energy efficiency of the mobile device, cloud-based calculations, etc.  There might be some potential overlaps in projects, it would not be the case for all projects.  A general discussion ensued in which project-based learning was brought up and the benefits of this sort of learning methodology were briefly discussed.  Allen and Minin brought up a concern about students recycling projects in multiple courses.  It was suggested that perhaps students could develop a portfolio of projects undertaken throughout their undergraduate careers.
  • The course was approved as proposed.
• Makela led a discussion regarding preparing for the external review and ABET accreditation processes
  • Kudeki stated that the last ABET accreditation took place for our undergraduate curriculum in 2007.  The department passed with flying colors.  The previous external review was undertaken in 2008.  The external reviews are more comprehensive and look at undergraduate education, graduate education, and the various research areas within the department.  Again, the department was evaluated very positively.  The upcoming review, in the spring of 2016, is expected to be undertaken by a significantly smaller review group than the previous one.
  • Schutt-Aine described the ABET process.  Importantly, a set of documents needs to be generated including self-studies of the individual instructors, details of the learning objectives of the courses, and self-assesments of how the courses are meeting their learning objectives.  Example work products (excellent, average, poor) are also collected.  Having some of these documents collected mid-evaluation cycle could be beneficial.  Makela stated that the committee should consider making a recommendation and conveying it to the faculty to collect some of this information from the fall 2015 semester so that it would be on hand for the external review in the spring.
  • Kudeki mentioned some of the interesting facets of the exit survey the department has conducted.  It suggests that the incoming students mention the excellent facilities as a significant reason for enrolling in our department.  This is presumably linked to the new building.  He also stated that the concern with job security is declining and that there has been a steady 15-year increase in the perception of the importance of ECE in solving societal concerns amongst our students.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:57pm.

Action Items