ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for March 6, 2009

1. The Minutes of the February 27, 2009 meeting were approved.
2. The Chair reported that Lenny Pitts, who chairs the CS Undergraduate Affairs Committee (their counterpart of our Curriculum Committee), said he would bring our various suggestions for CS/CompE curricular coordination mechanisms to his committee on March 16, and would respond thereafter. Matt Frank reported that Craig Zilles of CS and Steve Lumetta have already independently been discussing coordination of the computer architecture courses.
3. Donna Brown reported that the Computer Engineering Area Committee is supportive of either an ECE or EE undergraduate minor as the rest see fit, but is not supportive of a separate Computer Engineering minor.
4. The proposed guidelines for evaluating whether courses should be allowed for ECE technical elective credit were approved as follows:
   
   Courses offered by all natural science and engineering departments are generally acceptable, subject to the following conditions
   • The course is required or is a technical elective for majors in that department's curricula
   • The course content is technical
   • No seminars, individual study or thesis, temporary or variable topics courses are allowed
   • The course does not have significant overlap with courses or material already covered in our programs
5. Possible needs for future longer-term curricular initiatives were discussed.
   • Many felt that such a discussion is premature until the advanced core revisions are completed.
   • There seemed to be a general sense that another systems course, in particular with more control systems, is needed, but different people expressed very different visions about the form of such a course and what should be included.
   • Tangul Basar suggested that we monitor closely the number of students opting for STAT 400 and 410 as an alternative to ECE 313, which we believe to be a much-preferred option.
   • Kent Choquette asked how we will monitor our curricular revisions to ensure that they achieve Curriculum Committee objectives in practice.
   • Doug Jones expressed his concern that the workload in some courses greatly exceeds the course credit given.
6. The Committee adjourned at 3:48 PM.