2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 82: Remote, Hands-on ECE Teaching: Project RECET

Presented at Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE) Poster Session

RECET (Remote Electrical and Computer Engineering Teaching) is a pilot project developed by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) to help provide quality ECE education even when fully online and explore issues associated with blended online and in-person instruction for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic forced most ECE programs in the US to rapidly go online. Departments found this transition quite challenging if they had not previously developed materials and infrastructure for online delivery. Online compatible techniques for teaching have been developed and researched for years, but prior to COVID-19 they were not widely deployed across ECE Departments in the US. The extraordinary push to online learning forced programs to look to experienced instructors at other academic institutions and educational hardware and software engineers in industry for help. ECEDHA and IEC offered online meetings to facilitate communication between faculty and teaching support staff from their member programs, but missing was a searchable, curated, content repository, especially for remote hands-on learning. Project RECET is working to fill this void by enabling active sharing of course content with other institutions and industry.
RECET, while still a pilot, has passed through several revisions to improve the user experience. RECET visitors are greeted by a diagram that shows its basic structure as seen by content users or providers. Content is tagged by topic, course level and hardware and/or software platform. Content presently available is generally limited to circuits and electronics, where the need during COVID-19 was the greatest. A communication channel between industry and the academy has been created and a process is under development by which the learning products can be created, maintained, socialized, and owned to promote a new trans-institutional culture to increase the impact of engineering education research on ECE education.
The RECET website is now being used to promote and collect feedback from potential content users and providers, to systematically improve the repository impact and to prepare for its eventual scale-up. The vision of RECET to enable more effective collaboration between ECE programs for educational delivery has been socialized throughout the communities served by ECEDHA and IEC. There have been articles in online newsletters and presentations at online and in-person meetings, with a particular emphasis on regional meetings of department heads. Unfortunately, interest in a repository like RECET has waned since COVID-19 restrictions on ECE educational delivery have been eliminated. Many programs have gone to a new normal, but they have done so by almost entirely addressing their remote delivery issues locally. ECE departmental leadership largely considers the issues their programs had to deal with during COVID-19 as solved and the forces for change gone. Based on ideas that have been received from the ECE community, RECET is now in the process of pivoting so that the lessons learned during the pandemic can eventually lead to a true new normal.

Authors

Dr. Kenneth A Connor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4216-763X Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The Inclusive Engineering Consortium [biography]

Kenneth Connor is an emeritus professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he taught courses on electromagnetics, electronics and instrumentation, plasma physics, electric power, and general engineering. His research involves plasma physics, electromagnetics, photonics, biomedical sensors, engineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning. He learned problem solving from his father (who ran a gray iron foundry), his mother (a nurse) and grandparents (dairy farmers). He has had the great good fortune to always work with amazing people, most recently the members and leadership of the Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) from HBCU, HSI, and TCU ECE programs and the faculty, staff and students of the Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) ERC, where he was Education Director until his retirement in 2018. He was RPI ECSE Department Head from 2001 to 2008 and served on the board of the ECE Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) from 2003 to 2008. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
Mr. Douglas A Mercer [biography]

Doug Mercer received the B.S.E.E degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1977. He has 35 years experience in the linear IC industry in the design and development of high resolution and high speed data converter products. Since joining Analog Devi
Dr. Daniel D Stancil http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7741-1893 North Carolina State University at Raleigh [biography]

Daniel D. Stancil is the Alcoa Distinguished Professor and Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. His early interest in radios and electronics launched an engineering career that has been--and continues to be--fun and rewarding. Along the way he picked up engineering degrees from Tennessee Tech (B.S.E.E.) and MIT (M.S., E.E. and Ph.D.). He has spent many years as a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at both Carnegie Mellon University and NC State. While at CMU he served as Associate Head of the ECE Department, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering. He has been Department Head at NC State since 2009. He is a fellow of the IEEE, and has served as the President of the IEEE Magnetics Society and the ECE Department Heads Association.
Prof. John H. Booske University of Wisconsin - Madison [biography]

Professor John Booske has been a faculty member of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) since 1990. He led the department from 2009-2018 and is founder and Director of the Wisconsin Collaboratory for Enhanced Learni
Prof. Michael Devetsikiotis University of New Mexico
Dr. Barry J. Sullivan Electrical & Computer Engineering Department Heads Assn [biography]

Barry J. Sullivan is Director of Program Development for the Inclusive Engineering Consortium. His 40-year career includes significant experience as a researcher, educator, and executive in industry, academia, and the non-profit sector. He has developed
Dr. Kathy Ann Gullie [biography]

Gullie Consultants Services LLC,
Owner, Dr. Kathy A. Gullie Ph.D.
Dr. Kathy Gullie and her associates at Gullie Consultant Services LLC have been in education, assessment, program development and evaluation in New York State for over 30 years. A form
Michelle Klein Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. Heads Assoc. (ECEDHA)
Prof. Gregory T Byrd

Download paper (1.07 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

Academia-Industry Connections