2016-02-09 Meeting Notes

Date

Feb 09, 2016

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 2:04pm.
• Minutes from February 2, 2016 were approved.
• Dr. Hahn was not able to join the committee, so the agenda was modified to provide time to fill out and discuss the resources questionnaire put together by Minin.
  • Minin emphasized that the questionnaire was to be viewed as a "sparse matrix" and not every box needed to be filled out.
• After taking time to fill out the questionnaire, a general discussion of instructional resources ensued.
  
  • Kudeki described how he made his lecture notes open and available to students at the onset of the semester.  Others expressed concern that might adversely affect attendance and that students may (falsely) think that reading through these notes are an adequate substitute for coming to lectures and engaging the material.  Kudeki responded that he had not seen a noticeable change in attendance after implementing this.
  • Schmitz described that at the 100-level, the attendance policy hedges against people not showing up.
  • Kudeki raised a question regarding whether anyone on the committee had positive experiences using iClickers.  Schmitz mentioned that iClicker responses can be a way to easily check attendance in lecture.  Minin described that it took him multiple semesters to get the type of questions amenable to iClickers correct.  He also emphasized that iClickers might not make sense in smaller courses, in which personal interactions with the students is easier to attain.  
  • Kudeki raised a concern that iClickers might slow down the lecture and impede the flow of material.  Fliflet, agreed the the technology can take consider amounts of time to set up (correctly). Allen stated that he just uses the low-tech method of having students raise hands to basic questions of understanding, and then works backwards on the board to find where the misunderstandings have occurred.  Makela countered that there is a concern that "herd mentality" might take over and students will raise their hands indicating they understand just because "everyone else is."  The anonymity afforded by iClickers addresses this concern.
  • Makela asked what level multiple-section courses should coordinate on.  The general consensus was that the course goals and instructional outcomes must be the same for all sections of a course and that the most logical level to coordinate on would be weekly homework.  This allows individual faculty members the flexibility to speed up and slow down as they deem necessary for their individual section, while ensuring that the same material is covered in roughly equivalent times.
  • Makela asked about multi-section courses that have different "flavors", such as has been the case for ECE 313 is recent semesters.  In these cases, different sections might have different homework and exams.  The committee agreed that as long as the course director was satisfied that the different sections were satisfying the course's stated goals and instructional outcomes, the variety between the sections would be allowable.  Makela raised the question of how grades were distributed/normalized across different sections, if the material (homework, exams) was different.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:49pm.

Action Items