Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

University of Florida

April 24, 1998

This proposal is a direct response to the request for proposal from the Office of Instructional Resources for the development of BS degree programs in Engineering.

Faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department have been involved in distance learning technologies and information technology enhanced teaching for some time. Drs Doty and Arroyo have developed multimedia versions of several courses they teach and Dr. Principe has designed an interactive electronic book to be used in classroom and distance learning settings. Dr. Latchman who is the SUCCEED CIT Leader for the University of Florida, has been working with the Technology-based Curriculum Delivery Focus Team in developing WWW and CD-ROM based course materials as well as in evaluating the effectiveness of these teaching techniques. In addition we have just received a grant of $135,000 from the Sloan Foundation (with 50% matching and a discounted 15% overhead rate) for developing a MS degree program to be delivered using an Asynchronous Learning Network (ALN) approach. Furthermore several other faculty members have consistently been using the WWW for class notes and other student-student and student-teacher interactions over the past several years.

We propose to undertake the development of an online BS in Electrical Engineering (BSEE-online) with delivery via a variety of distance education technologies, using an ECE-Online server.

Electrical engineering is a science-oriented branch of engineering primarily concerned with all phases and development of the transmission and utilization of electric energy and intelligence. The study of electrical engineering can be conveniently divided into the academic areas of circuits, communications, computer engineering, control, electric energy systems, electromagnetics, electronics and photonics.

The area of computer engineering has become a major part of electrical engineering, so much so that a separate degree is offered in computer engineering. Computer engineering, in a broad sense, deals with the body of knowledge that forms the theoretical and practical basis for the storage, retrieval, processing, analysis, recognition and display of information. This area also includes the design and implementation of computer systems and peripheral devices for information handling and engineering applications.

Because of the extremely rapid growth and changes relating to the application of electrical and computer engineering principles, the electrical engineering and computer engineering curricula are designed for concentration on a solid core of foundation courses. Electives are taken according to individual interest to permit a student to delve more deeply into subject matter previously introduced. Technical electives must be taken from the approved lists. With a careful selection of courses, a student can earn both a degree in electrical engineering (B.S.E.E.) and a degree in computer engineering (B.S.C.E.N.) with a few more hours than is required for either degree.

By virtue of the very nature of Electrical Engineering, our courses have varying components of mathematics and science, as well as required design and laboratory experience. In general it is much more straightforward to convert the science, mathematics and even the design components for distance education delivery. It is a much more challenging matter to offer laboratory courses using distance education technology.

The crucial student provided component in this initiative a multimedia computer with Internet access to the ECE departments computer facilities. This will facilitate software delivery and application access. Multimedia class materials as well as electronic student-student and student-instructor communication interfaces will also be accessible via the student’s computer.

On the other hand, laboratory material which involves simulation and inexpensive hardware have been delivered via distance education by Dr. Michel Lynch (on an experimental basis) by requiring the students to have the necessary free or student versions of simulation software and hardware such as microprocessor evaluation boards.

Basic test and fabrication equipment appropriate to the course might also be required. For example, in a circuits lab course, a digital voltmeter, prototyping board and soldering tools may suffice. However, AC and digital circuits would require access to an oscilloscope. While introductory AC circuits courses may be able to use a narrow bandwidth oscilloscope (F_bw < 2 MHz), digital and advanced analog circuits courses would require higher bandwidth devices (F_bw > 50 MHz). Oscilloscopes of the wider bandwidth variety, while less expensive now than in the past (less than $1000.00 with academic discounts), can be acquired in a number of ways. They can be purchased, leased or rented by the student. Alternatively the ECE department may elect to provide the required instruments for use by the student, perhaps with an appropriate laboratory fee in addition to regular tuition charges.

Another possibility is provide student access to UF laboratories on weekends and/or providing some services such as PAL programming by using courier services between the students and the laboratories at the University of Florida.

In this proposal we will address only the B.S.E.E. degree, although the other course required for the B.S.C.E.N. degree may be added at a later date.

We propose to maintain the same admission requirements for the BSEE-Online program as for our on-campus BSEE offering and we will also seek to preserve the accreditation by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) for the BSEE-Online program. Our proposal covers only the core and elective courses taken directly in ECE department during the junior and senior years so that incoming students will already have the required freshman and sophomore year materials covered in other programs.

Applicants should have an overall grade point average of 2.0, and a minimum combined grade point average of 2.5 in the pre-engineering technical courses, in accordance with College of Engineering admission protocol.

Once admitted, an electrical or computer engineering student shall maintain satisfactory progress - generally C or better in all required courses - and a junior/senior level grade point average of 2.0 or higher. In particular, a student cannot take an electrical or computer engineering course without having earned a minimum grade of C in the prerequisite courses.

In addition to the other requirements for a bachelor's degree, a student must have at least a 2.0 grade point average in all electrical or computer engineering courses, both required and elective. If a course is repeated, both grades count in this grade point average.

The table below gives the list of courses to be included in the BSEE-Online program, with a proposed development time-table and the faculty members who would undertake the required development.

Semester 5

Semester 6

Semester 7

Semester 8

Semester 9

Total Hours Required for Degree (Upper Division) ........................71

1. These courses are offered outside the department and special arrangements will need to be made to offer these online.
2. These technical electives can be taken otherwise with prior approval. The courses shown here will be offered online to provide an immediate online offering. Other ECE courses will be added for online consumption on a phased basis.

Since the courses above already exist and are presently being taught using conventional class-room based delivery mechanisms, the effort to offer the BSEE-Online program asynchronously will require that the course materials be made available via the Internet and internal campus networks. Furthermore it is proposed to develop a central infrastructure within the ECE Department for student-student and student-teacher interactions using a common groupware platform, augmented by WWW and Internet based electronic communication tools. While we will continue to evaluate other emerging conferencing systems, we will launch our program using Allaire Forums for all courses as the standard interface to the online materials.

ALN Attributes of the ECE-Online Courses 

ECE-Online courses in the BSEE-Online program will provide online material to supplement conventional course materials such as required or recommended text-books, software, CD-ROMs or self-learning systems. We do not propose to develop new courses under this project, although every effort will be made to update and keep current the material presented in the BSEE-Online program. Existing courses will be repackaged and offered as described above. We propose to use a common template for all courses with a centralized server for WWW and groupware, mailing lists as well as chat rooms. As newer courses are added, automated scripts will be developed and reused to configure appropriate servers.

All ECE- online courses will feature key ALN characteristics, including the following:

• Complete printed course manual prepared by the Instructor (and a selected textbook, if applicable)
• WWW accessible stored digitized video and audio (clips) of class sessions. In some, but not all cases, entire courses will be available via online streaming audio or video
• Electronic submission (email with attachments) of assignments
• Online electronic grading of selected assignments using WWW CGI and Java scripts
• Mailing listserver for interactions between students and with the instructor and the Teaching Assistant. A moderated subset from the listserver will be archived to a WWW site and a Newsgroup
• Interactive Chat Rooms for ‘live’ discussion among students and instructors
• Remote access to ECE computer and network resources
• CD with complete course materials, video and audio (selected courses only)
• Videotapes of some class sessions and demonstrations (available on request)
• Audio tapes of some class sessions (available on request)
• The availability and use of voice bridge, MBONE or CUSEEME for (synchronous) audio and video conferencing with groups of students will provide for electronic office hours and one-to-one or one-many consultation with the instructor and or teaching assistant. This facility will be optional and will not be an integral part of the program.
• A complete self-contained WWW site (www.ece-online.ufl.edu/course) for each SCITEL course with links to

- Course outline and syllabus

- Recent course announcements

- Frequently asked questions (Faq’s) and answers

- Lecture notes

- Assignments and solutions

- Past and sample tests, solutions and worked examples

- E-mail links to instructor and TA

- Links to student www pages - which will feature among other things, regularly updated progress on the term paper

- Links to listserver and chatrooms

- Links to other sites of relevance to this course

- Links to groupware databases

As a minimum all students taking ECE-Online courses will be required to have a multimedia PC with standard wordprocessing and WWW sofware and access to the Internet at least at 33.6 kbps. All other software required will be downloadable from the ECE department or from the Internet.