November 12, 2013, Minutes of the Curriculum Committee Meeting
- Bruce Hajek (Deactivated)
ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for November 12, 2013
Members AY 2013-14: Tangul Basar, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Deming Chen, John Dallesasse, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, Bruce Hajek (Chair), Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Daniel Liberzon, Yi Lu, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, Elyse Rosenbaum, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Paris Smaragdis, Venu Veeravalli, Daniel Wasserman
Attendees: Belabbas, Dallesasse, Dominguez-Garcia, Hajek, Hanumolu, Kudeki, Levinson, Liberzon, Oelze, Raginsky, Smaragdis, Veeravalli, Wasserman
1. The minutes of the meeting of October 29 were approved.
2. Two visitors were invited to the meeting in connection with the committee's charge from Bill Sanders to "Imagine new ways of teaching ECE courses in support of the "Wider" Award." First, Andy Singer came and explained his experience with flipping ECE 310 the last three times he taught the course. The most recent offering, in Spring 2013 co-taught with Paris Smaragdis, included the following elements: (a) Four to five concepts to be mastered per week were listed in a table on the course website. Reading was assigned from the course notes on those topics, (b) About two ten minute instructional videos per week were prepared by the instructors and made available to the students to watch at home. (c) Homework problems with solutions were provided for each week. (d) Students in each section are signed up for MWF slots (there were two sections of 60 students). In the Monday session the instructors give a one hour overview of the concepts for the week. The Monday lectures complemented the videos. Theory was given with less emphasis on examples. (e) On Wednesdays the class time was taken up by problem solving with formats varying from week to week. Each student was to master each of the five concepts for the week. (f) Half of each Friday was also taken up by problem solving. The other half of each Friday the students were given a quiz based on one of the homework problems. The quizzes were graded by the TAs. (g) The TAs offered a large number of office hours. Students were required to go to the TAs and get certification that they knew the particular concepts for the week. (h) A traditional evening midterm and traditional final exam were offered. Andy felt the course format was especially effective for helping the weaker students keep up with the course. He also felt the students were more enthusiastic about continuing to learn about signal processing and pursue projects in it after the semester ended than for courses taught by the usual format. He believes the outcomes on midterms and final exams were typical of outcomes for other semesters.
3. The visitor for the second half of the meeting was Geoffrey Herman (visiting professor with the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education, co-principal investigator of the NSF Wider Award). Geoffrey explained that one goal of the Wider initiative is to help insure that course contents and teaching format be jointly developed and commonly agreed upon by instructors. Another goal is to help instructors develop assessment tools, such as carefully designed multiple choice tests, to evaluate how well students have mastered the concepts of a particular course.
4. Barring unforeseen requests, the CC will NOT meet on November 19. Next meeting would be December 3.
5. The meeting was adjourned at 1:50 p.m.
These minutes drafted by B. Hajek, November 12, 2013.