1. EDULEARN 2011 2-Jul-2012 Software Defined Radio Research Group Presentation by: Simon Winberg Department of Electrical Engineering University of Cape Town Pedagogical Innovations in Engineering Education Cape Town South Africa

2. Reporting on a ‘Curriculum refinement’ process for an engineering degree course

3.  Four-year BSc in Electrical & Computer Engineering  Curriculum changes to accommodate: Responsiveness in terms of industry needs Responsibility in terms of fundamentals, Washington accord, Engineering council

4.  How can we accommodate our industry partners’ needs while maintaining the requirements for other stakeholders (i.e., degree certification requirements as set out by the engineering council, etc.).

5. Q: What parts of the curriculum are suitable for change to accommodate industry needs? Q: What parts can - or should - be left alone?

6.  Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Degree programme ◦ Offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town ◦ Follows more an electronics and special-purpose computer systems design perspective (in contrast to the computer science approach) What jobs does the degree lead to? … Integrates Hardware + Software Design

7. Digital computer circuit design Embedded system & software design Control system design Telecoms Digital Signal Processing programming + many others

8.  Industry collaborators 3 South African companies ◦ 2x companies involved in development of special- purpose high-end embedded systems & software ◦ 1x company involved in development of software for high performance computing applications

9.  Industry collaborators  Research collaborators: 2 South African research institutions ◦ Karoo Array Telescope Project (KAT): the South African part of the international Square Kilometre Array project) ◦ Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Collaborations In terms of Software defined radio, radar, use of hardware description languages

10.  Carried out as a part of a larger curriculum renewal project that concerns: ◦ Updating courses to use up-to-date tools ◦ Reducing duplication between courses ◦ Re-evaluating service courses used and provided ◦ Time line mid-2009  Dec 2014 the process … For accommodating or industry partners’ needs

11. 1. Data gathering Meetings, telephone, email archive Refinement & Trade-offs 2. Analysing the data Making lists of points requested, identifying commonalities, prioritizing items, negotiating trade-offs 3. Refining the curriculum Identify main courses to make changes to. Discuss curriculum requests with lecturer(s) involved. Report back to the partners.

13. Types of knowledge related to most of collaborators’ requests Level 3 Level 5 following approach described by Henson (2006)

14. Desired graduate qualities (effective/valuing) Techniques grads Should learn (cognitive/ comprehension) Application contexts & problems (cognitive/application) Types of systems / projects students should do (cognitive/application) Important professional qualities (affective / organizing) Henson’s Knowledge domain / knowledge level in parentheses

16.  All collaborators agreed that the fundamental ‘core knowledge’ of the computer engineering discipline needs to be ‘protected’ – regardless of immediate industry/technology needs “… Typically, candidates are chosen not f or experience in any single technology or environment, but for a strong grounding in the fundamental concepts” (ind. collaborator 1) core

17.  Commonly discussed: Professional values & the underpinning of professional expertise  Difficult to explain in clear terms – generally discussed as largely tacit qualities that a professional develops over time (‘a professional knows how to behave professionally’) “… taking responsibility …” (ind. collaborator 5) “… able to do time-planning, Gantt charts, budgets…” (res. collaborator 3)

18.  Incorporate problem-solving for particular application contexts – train students to use relevant tools for these contexts  Including simulated work conditions: e.g. reviewing designs, decision marking, leadership, design critique and peer assessment “… taking responsibility …” (ind. collaborator 5) Assessing students’ assessment ability

19.  A collection of specific tools and techniques were identified from the collaboration  Both industry & research partners recommended against specific training – they qualified requests with alternate approaches “Our products are built with java…and a tomcat server. … Embedded coding in java is obviously not essential in the course, mastering embedded programming in C would be effective also.” (ind. collaborator 4)

22. breadth of know- ledge & flexibility  Implementing curriculum changes…  Collaborators generally want graduates with experience and skills that can be applied in a broad application contexts using a variety of tools  Towards: depth of disciplinary knowledge ‘T-shaped’ graduates * * Rip 2004

24.  SKA meerKAT (Karoo Array Telescope) project for SDRRG and RHINO funding  Xilinx for donations & support of RHINO project  Texas Instruments for donation of development resources and hardware  SDRG team: thanks to Prof. Inggs, Dr. Langman, Dr. Mishra, and the SDRG students

25.  Rip, A., 2004, "Strategic research, post-modern universities and research training," Higher Education Policy, 17, pp. 153-166.  Shackelford, R., McGettrick, A., Sloan, R., Topi, H., Davies, G., Kamali, R., Cross, J., Impagliazzo, J., LeBlanc, R., and Lunt, B., 2006, "Computing curricula 2005: The overview report," ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 38(1), pp. 456-457.  2002, "Agents for change: Bringing industry and academia together to develop career opportunities for young researchers. Policy Briefing 17, European Science Foundation, Stockholm (Sweden).  ACM, 2004, "Computer Engineering 2004 - Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Engineering," Association for Computing Machinery.  Henson, K. T., 2006, Curriculum planning: Integrating multiculturalism, constructivism, and education reform, Waveland Pr Inc.

26. QUESTIONS?