April 15, 2014, Minutes of the Curriculum Committee Meeting
- Bruce Hajek (Deactivated)
ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for April 15, 2014
Members AY 2013-14: Tangul Basar, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Deming Chen, John Dallesasse, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, Bruce Hajek (Chair), Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Daniel Liberzon, Yi Lu, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, Elyse Rosenbaum, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Chris Schmitz, Paris Smaragdis, Venu Veeravalli, Daniel Wasserman, Hao Zhu
Attendees: Basar, Kudeki, Levinson, Makela, Oelze, Sanders, Schmitz, Veeravalli (chaired meeting), Wasserman, Zhu
1. The minutes of April 1 were approved.
2. Erhan Kudeki suggested that our committee should discuss how to provide additional workstations in the new building for students who need to use them outside of scheduled class times. We should add this as an agenda item for a future meeting.
3. Discussion of 398PCAS proposal and syllabus:
Jonathan Makela summarized the motivation for the course: to provide the students opportunity to develop project ideas and lay the groundwork for success in the 445 senior design course. Andy Singer would help with bringing an entrepreneurial aspect into the course.
Some questions from the committee:
a. what fraction of students taking 445 will take this course?
b. will it perhaps increase the disparity in performance of students taking 445 since the ones taking 398PCAS will be better prepared?
c. should it be a free elective or technical elective? (The consensus of the committee was that is should be a free elective.)
d. should our 445 be full year course, incorporating this course as part 1?
The committee conditionally approved the course as a free elective.
4. Discussion of Math 487/ECE 493
John D'Angelo described his experience with the course, given that it is the first time it is being taught entirely by the Math department. There is some beautiful mathematics in the course, but the student audience for the course is not well defined and the diversity of the student population makes it challenging to teach.
The proposal to the curriculum committee is that the course should be split into two courses, ECE 293 and ECE 493, with the rationale being that one cannot expect to teach basis concepts such as dot products and more advanced theory such as Sturm-Liouville theory in the same class. A suggestion is to eliminate Math 225 and the extra hour in Math 286 (covering linear algebra) to make room for a course like 293.
There was some discussion about when such a 293 course should be taken. Spring semester of the sophomore year?
These minutes drafted by V. Veeravalli, April 20, 2014.
Addendum: Jonathan Makela relayed answers to the above questions from Scott Carney a few days after the meeting:
a. what fraction of students taking 445 will take this course?
It is difficult to predict, and we won't know until it is offered (probably for the second time, as word of mouth will either say it was/wasn't useful which will increase/decrease enrollment numbers).
b. will it perhaps increase the disparity in performance of students taking 445 since the ones taking 398PCAS will be better prepared?
The point of the course is to better prepare the students, so if there was no performance benefit, the course wouldn't be doing its job! However, it is important that none of the work that is consider a deliverable for 445 would be completed in 398PCAS. That is, the students will learn HOW to write documentation for a design review, a requirements table, etc. They would NOT be writing the specific documentation for their 445 project, since that would be done in the following semester.
c. should it be a free elective or technical elective? (The consensus of the committee was that is should be a free elective.)
Free elective is fine.
d. should our 445 be full year course, incorporating this course as part 1?
This is a larger discussion that the curriculum committee needs to have. Running 398PCAS may inform this discussion. The 445 staff intends to work out an assessment for students taking 398PCAS to track them through 445 to measure the impact of the 398PCAS course on 445 performance.