A special meeting was held involving just the dean, chairs and ATLAS director.
Summary of 10/14/2016 EAC Meeting
Rob summarized the Engineering Advisory Council meeting held 10 days prior. The morning was focused on research and industry, while the afternoon was focused on three of the departments. A high level of enthusiasm and engagement was present at the meeting. The department chairs did very nice jobs in their presentations.
Teaching Loads and Class Sizes
Rob presented data showing that some departments are teaching both very large courses (100 or more students) and very small courses (less than ten students) and suggested that fewer small courses be taught, allowing the larger courses to be split sectioned. Each department then shared its perspective and approach:
AES: Has large lectures but smaller labs for each course, so may not benefit from splitting lectures.
ChBE: Teaches 400 in Chem for Engineers in Fall, but is starting to split its core courses. Still, many sections are 100 are larger, whereas smaller than 75 is needed to affect the style and impact.
CEAE: Also has large lecture classes with labs, but is starting to split larger courses into sections now that the faculty numbers have grown. Its largest courses are 120.
CS: It has multiple sections of 300 students or more in some subjects, and is hiring more instructors.
ECEE: Used to offer many very small PhD courses due to stove piping.
ME: Is split-sectioning core courses. Ideally would like section sizes less than 60.
It was also noted that some of the small sections on the books are on-line sections associated with regular courses, or individual project sections. There was also discussion of common courses across departments. ECEE, which has relatively low enrollments and student-credit-hour generation is interested in teaching circuits for non-majors (including e+ students), whereas large-enrollment departments such as AES, ChBE and ME are interested in teaching their own core courses but allowing students to take another department鈥檚 course in the same subject to provide flexibility. Per a recent request from e+ to add GEEN courses in circuits and materials, Ken Anderson will facilitate a discussion of e+ with ECEE about the former and with AES/ChBE/ME about that the latter.
Stimulating Research Growth
Approaches discussed include the campus seed grants program, college support for large proposals, and aligning incentives for faculty to lead large efforts.
Budget Update
Rob noted that our college is expecting additional funds due to higher-than-anticipated undergraduate enrollments. While much of these funds will be used next year (eg, for faculty hiring and startup packages), he expects to make additional allocations for the current fiscal year. Additional instructor hires, advisors, lab staff, and marketing for professional master鈥檚 programs were mentioned as needs. It was also noted that it would be better to share communications staff between two vs three departments.
Departmental Seminars
There is still strong interest in college support of departmental seminars, perhaps on the order of $5 鈥� 10K per year per department, as long as the request process is simple.
What Else?
Concern was expressed over a recent request from the First-level Review Committee regarding content of departmental PUEC reports and dossiers for reappointment, promotion and tenure cases. In particular, information requested should be aligned with the existing college policies and procedures document 鈥� a departmental list of journals and impact factors does not seem to be a worthy exercise, since faculty members in a given department have a wide range of interdisciplinary research areas and use different journals. Comments about 鈥渟ocial-type studies鈥� vs 鈥渞eal engineering research鈥� were also questioned. In turn, it was requested that the FLRC provide reasoning for dissenting opinions when it has split votes.
In Attendance
Rob Davis, Penny Axelrad, Charles Musgrave, Balaji Rajagopalan, Liz Jessup, Bob McLeod, Se-Hee Lee, Mark Gross