2015-11-04 Meeting Notes

Date

Nov 04, 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

Guest: Lynford Goddard

Discussion Items

Minutes

• The meeting was called to order at 2:05pm.
• The revised syllabus provided to the curriculum committee for ECE 481: Nanotechnology, which was discussed and approved over email in a prior week, was brought to the attention of the committee as a point of information.  No concerns were raised.
• Makela initiated a discussion of ECE 398BD: Making Sense of Big Data.
  • The course is currently under consideration at the College level for addition to the permanent course roster.
  • The proposed syllabus has reduced the number of topics (and faculty members involved) to three from five.  Makela stated that the understanding was that all students would take all three parts and receive three credit hours.  That is, the idea to give students the ability to only take a subset of the sections was not under consideration in the current proposal.
  • The course proposal was approved.
• Goddard joined the meeting to discuss the status of ECE 446: Principles of Experimental Research.
  • This course was proposed and approved for consideration as a permanent course by the ECE Curriculum Committee and the ECE Graduate Committee in 2013.  However, concerns were raised at the college level, and the College did not approve the course.  Instead, the College requested one of three actions:

We would like the ECE Curriculum Committee to consider the points raised by the College subcommittee which reviewed the course.  Then they should do one of three things:

1. Resubmit the Course as is, clearly indicating that the proposal has the support of the Department
2. Resubmit the Course with modifications which address some or all of the concerns that were raised.
3. Decide not to resubmit the course for approval.

The Executive Committee as a whole will then make a determination perhaps after consulting with the subcommittee.

• • Additional detail from the College-level subcommittee was provided, raising five concerns, as detailed in the CoE Report.
  • No action was taken in 2014, but Goddard is no requesting that the committee consider responding to the College so that the course can be considered, again, in hopes of offering it in Fall 2016.
  • Goddard mentioned that he was not concerned with the enrollment numbers from when the course was offered as a ECE 498 course.  His ideal enrollment was on the order of 20 students, due to lab resources.  In addition, he would expect this course to be attractive to students in the M.Eng program, which was not in place when the College subcommittee considered the course.
  • Goddard mentioned that he was not able to provide details on the laboratory portion of the course, and so some of the concerns regarding the need to address topics in the course in a laboratory setting may have been overblown.
  • A general discussion about the course perquisites followed.  Goddard did not object to the suggestion that the prerequisite was essentially that of senior standing in ECE.  However, he had been advised that such a prerequisite could be frowned upon and, therefore, added several course perquisites (i.e., ECE 329, 313, etc).
    • Kudeki mentioned that a shorter list of prerequisites could be better and leveraging, instead, the implied "consent of instructor" to filter students.
    • A question was asked as to how topics were brought up, and how important the specific prerequisites were.  Goddard replied that most of the germane material from the prerequisites were taught "just in time" and so students would be given exposure to the pertinent material, rather than relying strictly on the prerequisite courses.
    • Makela asked what the general feedback was from the students in the ECE 498 offerings, and if they felt prepared for the course.  Goddard responded that in general the combination of seeing material in lectures, homework, and then the lab allowed for them to come up to speed as needed.  In addition, he held office hours in the lab setting to make himself available for additional questions while the students worked there.
    • Goddard pointed out that the overlap with IE 400 was in the lecturing components.  IE 400 does not have a laboratory component.  Makela further pointed out that IE 400 was limited to students from Industrial Engineering Department (see here).  Therefore, that there is overlap should not be a concern.
  • The committee further discussed the comments from the College subcommittee alluding to the students' preparation and potential frustration.
    • Several members pointed out that many of the skills (undertaking an independent project, conducting a literature review) are, or are similar to, what we expect our students to demonstrate in ECE 445 another senior-level courses, and so they should also be able to demonstrate them in the proposed course.  Given the support provided by the instructor in the design of the lectures and homework, in addition to his presence in the lab, we would expect our students to be able to perform in the proposed course.
  • Makela proposed that he would work with Goddard to address the concerns of the College subcommittee and draft up a response for consideration by the curriculum committee at a future meeting.  It was agreed that the Department had already expressed its support of the course through the original approvals of the Graduate and Curriculum committees.  However, significant revision of the course was not required.  Thus, the response would fall somewhere between response #1 and #2 requested by the college.
• Minin gave an overview of the activities of the subcommittee formed to look into course delivery mechanisms.  A summary is provided here.
• The committee briefly discussed a Science Article pointed to by Levinson titled "Challenge faculty to transform STEM learning".  The discussion centered on the ideas that there appeared to be no general consensus on this topic, but that any changes needed to be connected to learning, or perhaps instructional, outcomes.
• The meeting adjourned at 2:58pm.

Action Items