2016-03-29 Meeting Notes

Date

Mar 29, 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.
• After brief discussion, the minutes from March 15, 2016 were approved.
• Makela presented draft thoughts on delivery of the core ECE curriculum, consolidated from committee discussions over the current academic year.  The committee discussed the slides and offered comments and suggestions for improvement.
  • Allen asked if we were going to quantitatively define what was "small" or "large" in terms of class size and how/why that changed desired teaching methodologies.  Kudeki suggested that "small" allowed for more personal interactions, such as learning all the students' names, as well as dialog and discussions during lecture.  Waldrop pointed out that in larger sections, student inhibitions could get in the way of these sort of interactions.  Kudeki pointed out that section sizes in ECEB are dictated by the available class sizes, which was a consideration in the design of the building.  Schmitz pointed out that even when there are multiple sections, aimed at being in the ~100 student range, some lectures organically grow due to time or reputation of the lecturer.  They have had to move sections into Grainger Auditorium in the past to accommodate these cases.  Kudeki pointed out that some courses in the advanced core (i.e., 385, 391) are large, but have lab sections, or similar, that allow for interactions within smaller groups.
  • On slide 5, the committee suggested the phrase "Faculty should be encouraged to incorporate various teaching methodologies" be changed to "Faculty should be free to try out and utilize various teaching methodologies.  It was also suggested that the phrase "we recognize that this is not the optimal/preferred method" by changed to "we recognize that this may not be the optimal method".
  • Kudeki pointed out that the course directors play a role in maintaining historical knowledge.  Not all units across campus utilize the course director framework, but ECE has found this to be beneficial.  It was suggested that there might be benefit to rotating course directors every so often.  Kudeki noted that this is typically considered at major curricular change points.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:56pm.

Action Items