ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for February 22, 2008

Guests: Andrew Singer

1. The Minutes of the February 15, 2008 meeting were approved with minor corrections.
2. The Chair reported briefly on a meeting regarding the emerging iFoundry curriculum initiative, describing it as a kind of college-wide curricular incubator through which departments can experiment more readily with new courses and curricula before committing to adopting them for all students. The exact form of the initiative is still evolving.
3. The ECE 498 LG course proposal by Lynford Goddard was approved. Several committee members expressed their enthusiasm about the novel educational concepts in this experimental course.
4. Andy Singer described his ECE 498 LEE course proposal and clarified various points: most of the lectures will be given by him; most or all of the students this summer will be participants in IVentures 10, a ten-week intensive entrepreneurial program in which they go from concept to prototype; for ECE 498 LEE, all students will develop and present a product idea and both a business and engineering plan. Prof. Singer hopes to continue this course, most likely ultimately under an ENG or TEC rubric, although the format would necessarily be somewhat different during the academic year. He recommended that it receive technical elective credit. The Curriculum Committee approved the course under these conditions.
5. Prof. Singer was asked to give his general thoughts regarding whether courses with an entrepreneurial or business flavor should receive technical elective credit. He stated that, in his opinion, any course developing or exercising students' knowledge or skills that will make them better engineers and that requires them to synthesize something should be a technical elective. That is, a course that makes a student a better practicing engineer should be a technical elective, and a course that makes a student a better human being should be a free elective. He personally believes that business courses related to practice should be allowed.
6. Prof. Singer was also asked to describe the changes to ECE 410 in preparation for repositioning it as ECE 310 in accordance with the Curriculum Committee's resolution on core courses. He stated that the course is being redesigned to focus on the material most relevant to the majority of students who will not specialize in signal processing, with an emphasis on frequency analysis, working with sampled data, and general principles, understanding, and their practical application rather than details of specialized filter design algorithms, FFTs, and other topics of use only to the specialist. Such material will be moved to a 400-level course and merged with other material currently in ECE 551, the graduate-level DSP course.
7. The Committee adjourned at 11:58 AM.