CC Meeting Minutes Feb 2, 2015

ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for Feb 2, 2015

Members AY 2014-15:  Jont Allen, Michael Bailey, Can Bayram, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Deming Chen, Weng Cho Chew, Peter Dragic, John Dallesasse, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, Gary Eden, Bruce Hajek , Kiruba Haran, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Yi Lu, Steven Lumetta, Olgica Milenkovic, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Chris Schmitz, Paris Smaragdis, Lav Varshney, Venu Veeravalli (chair), Lara Waldrop, Hao Zhu, Wenjuan Zhu

Present: Jont Allen, Michael  Bailey, Can Bayram, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Peter Dragic, John Dallesasse, Kiruba Haran, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, Chris Schmitz,  Venu Veeravalli (chair), Lara Waldrop, Hao Zhu.

1. The meeting was called to order at 3 pm.
2. The minutes of the December 8 meeting were approved.
3. There was a discussion of the new course proposal for ECE 345, Design and Innovation from Scott Carney. This course is meant to provide juniors in ECE with an exposure to the engineering design process, to precede ECE 445 (Senior Design). There were some questions from the committee regarding low enrollments in the trial versions of the course, and whether it needs to be advertised better. It was suggested that Scott Carney should be invited to the CC meeting on Feb 9 to discuss this further with the CC. 
4. The rest of the meeting was dedicated to a discussion of the course proposal for ECE 298JA from Jont Allen. This is meant to be a course taken by engineering and math students in the first semester of their sophomore year. The main motivation for the course is that a number of our students place out of the required calculus courses, but they are not really ready to apply their knowledge to higher level engineering courses. This course attempts to fill this gap by providing a historical context for the topics, which may help the students in applying the mathematical results to engineering problems. There were several questions from the committee regarding the homework assignments and exams, whether the course can be taken in parallel with ECE 210, whether there are similar courses at other universities, and expected enrollment. There were also some suggestions to improve the wording of the course proposal and syllabus documents. It was decided the discussion be continued at the Feb 9, 2015, before voting on approval.
5. The meeting was adjourned at 3:50 PM.

These minutes drafted by V. Veeravalli, Feb 2, 2015.