2015-10-14 Meeting Notes

Date

Oct 14, 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 2:05pm.
• Minutes from October 7, 2015 were approved.
• Makela initiated a discussion on how to move forward on the goal of creating a recommendation regarding course delivery in our core.
  • Schmitz suggested that a subcommittee be formed that would pull together methods and where they have been used on campus.  Kudeki suggested that the subcommittee could focus on what is coming out of the SIIP developments.  
  • Minin pointed out that certain methods require significant time dedicated to developing material, and this can be a barrier to implementing these methods.
  • Topics for the subcommittee were discussed, including
    1. Survey SIIP courses in progress or completed in the University looking at the different teaching approaches and identifying what worked and what did not.  Investigate the condition that leads to success or failure of any particular approach. 
    2. Survey the courses in our own department that are heavily invested in "best practices" - like suite of lower level undergraduate courses like ECE 110. 
    3. Investigate how to integrate any new methodology into an existing course through a process of evolution rather than abrupt change.
    4. Investigate the different infrastructure used to support the new approaches so that the resources to implement new teaching methods or enhance current methods are available to all faculty.
  • The committee voted to have Minin chair this subcommittee, which would have open membership.  The first meeting will be held in place of the regular curriculum committee meeting on Wednesday, October 21, 2015 at 2:00pm.
• Veeravalli brought up the topic of ECE 398BD.  The course will be proposed again as a 398 for the spring while it is being considered as a permanent course.  In the meantime, the instructors are considering reformatting the class away from 5 independent application-driven examples of big data.  They are considering reducing this to 3 independent section, and are wondering if it is possible to have individual credits offered for each section.  In this way, students can choose which application areas they are interested in and only take those.  Currently, students do not see the connection between the sections, and have varying levels of engagement in certain sections due to varying interests.
  • Kudeki mentioned that variable credit courses are possible, although they can be difficult to administer.   
  • Makela suggested considering having one section on shared fundamentals, required for everyone in the course, and then splitting into two application areas that students choose between.
  • Veeravalli will bring these thoughts back to the course team for further discussion.
• Makela initiated a discussion on preparing for the external review and ABET.
  • Kudeki stated that some of the newer courses in the curriculum do not yet have formalized/published learning objectives, and these need to be generated for ABET.
  • The committee should request that all courses update/refresh their objective and learning outcomes statements and provide a snapshot of the course through the most recent syllabus.
  • A discussion about whether more should be requested of all the courses, such as self-evaluation narratives, example work (good, average, poor), etc.  This will help in the ABET process, but is a burden on the faculty.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:55pm.

Action Items