2015-11-11 Meeting Notes

Date

Nov 11, 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

Guest: Lynford Goddard

Discussion Items

Minutes

• The meeting was called to order at 2:05pm.
• Minutes from November 4, 2015 were approved.
• ECE 398PSC was briefly discussed.  The course is currently at the college for consideration as a permanent course.  The 398 course is requested so that the course can be offered next semester while that approval is pending.  The committee has approved this course twice in the past.  The committee voted to approve this course for the spring semester.
• The draft response written by Makela to the CoE subcommittee that evaluated ECE 445 was discussed.  Several suggestions for improving the response to the fourth and fifth points from the subcommittee were made and accepted.  The committee voted to approve the response.  Goddard has requested some information from the department regarding the availability of resources for the course.  Once that response is received, Makela will work with Goddard and the department to submit the letter to the college.
• Schutt-Aine asked about the status of ECE 447: Active Microwave Circuit Design.
  • Kudeki replied that it was not being offered in the spring semester due to staffing issues.  Dallesasse stated that this was a unique course to Illinois and taught our students critical skills that were in demand in industry.
• Haran asked about the status of collecting instructional artifacts as a midterm benchmark in our ABET accreditation and for preparation for the external review next semester.
  • After discussion, it was agreed that the curriculum committee would request that course directors update/create their instructional objectives, mapped to the ABET "student outcomes" criteria (page 3: http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/E001-15-16-EAC-Criteria-03-10-15.pdf), by the beginning of next semester.  In addition, during the 2016 calendar year, we would request that all instructors generate a self-assessment report for the courses they teach.  Makela will work to draft up this request and circulate it to the committee for comments.
  • The department's prior efforts in this area were discussed.  Makela asked what prior committee's had done with the material collected for ABET evaluations.  Levinson mentioned that during the previous ABET evaluation, the curriculum committee did collect and discuss these, but did not extensively analyze the information.  Karan stated that going through the exercise of self-reflection, on its own, is valuable for instructors.  Kudeki stated that having an active and involved curriculum committee was seen as a positive by the ABET accreditors.
• The meeting was adjourned at 2:57pm.

Action Items