October 2021
On the Future of ECE Education in a Rapidly-Transforming World,
Based on Recent Lessons from the Pandemic
By Badri Roysam, University of Houston​
The foundational core of the ECE undergraduate program has not changed significantly for multiple decades, going back to the days when I was an undergraduate student myself. While I am certainly not suggesting that we need to completely revamp our long-successful discipline that is rooted in well-established physical laws and mathematical principles, the pandemic and many other global “jolts” that we have experienced over the past year have certainly brought many fresh imperatives into focus. I feel that it is certainly an opportune time to examine these factors and start a discussion.
The pandemic triggered multiple “jolts” all at once. Universities implemented spending freezes, budget cuts, and fund sweeps in a bid to maintain financial stability in the face of revenue uncertainty. Most universities also implemented staff layoffs and hiring freezes that are only now beginning to be relieved. At the department level, the budget cuts, layoffs, and fund sweeps, especially at a time when we suddenly had to cover unplanned costs of distance teaching equipment, student support, remote lab infrastructure, marketing and student recruiting, and personnel safety measures, were extremely damaging and hampered our ability to cope with the raging pandemic. Going forward, ECE departments will routinely need to establish disaster preparedness plans and the ‘rainy day” funds that will not be raided by our upper administrations.
Most ECE departments rely heavily on a steady supply of student and post-doc talent from around the world, and this supply froze up suddenly. In fact, it continues to be a problem to this day, and will likely take several years to fully return to normalcy.
Regrettably, and despite heroic efforts by our faculty, all our constituents were hurt by deliberate misinformation throughout, and this continues to the present day, and has resulted in a palpably polarized and distrustful environment. Fortunately, there is growing recognition at the national and global levels of the dangers posed by misinformation, and the perennial optimists like me still hold out hope for a misinformation-free future world.
On the bright side, we I feel that coped extremely well overall. Our staff members worked out ways to maintain office operations remotely. Our network infrastructure (finally) received the needed upgrades, and we figured out ways to harness it. We now routinely teach and hold all kinds of meetings, and even conduct exams, using tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Respondus, etc. We grew comfortable with digital signatures for most office operations.
Notably, our faculty adjusted rapidly to online instruction, and so did the vast majority of our students. We went from reluctance and resistance, to embrace, and on to excellence over the course of just a year. We all adopted new technologies in a hurry, and our students were (surprisingly) well served overall. This is a transformational adjustment. We have all struggled in the past to get our faculty members to teach online. There has been a historical reluctance, and ECE Chairs have heard every conceivable reason / excuse against online teaching. All of this historical reluctance vanished in less than a year.
The implications of widespread online teaching ability are profound. Just a few years ago, online teaching was an expensive affair, requiring specially constructed studios with multiple cameras, green screens, and audio systems, all staffed by expert technicians and instructional designers. The new age of online teaching is a much simpler and universally affordable affair. It is fair to state that the technological revolution has just begin, and each year is sure to bring additional innovations that will further democratize and familiarize online learning.
Last year, many publishers made their textbooks available online, and many of them also provided them free of cost. Their reputation play helped us all. Student projects changed to rely more heavily on small low-power hardware systems that could be constructed and evaluated at home. Here is a picture of my home office, reflecting many of the changes that took place.
Bottom Line: Online methods for teaching and daily departmental operations are here to stay. Online teaching is no longer the preserve of a small number of elite well-funded universities. It has become a much more democratic affair, and this trend bodes well for the ECE discipline as a whole. Online methods provide cost and time efficiencies that were badly needed. They provide us with tremendous reach – at a scale that was not common before.
The key unanswered question is the following: Just how engaged are our students with online learning? In my experience, it is heavily dependent on two factors: (i) the skill of the instructor; and (ii) the attitude of the student. Some instructors were quick to recognize the engagement gap, and worked quickly and tirelessly to address it with creative teaching strategies, while the less experience instructors were slow to recognize it. Happily, the vast majority of students coped well, but there were a significant minority of students who did not. There were clear disparities though. The less wealthy students often suffered for lack of equipment, while some others suffered from distractions at home, and the inherent inability to stay focused with online courses.
We have much to learn about ways to achieve and maintain student engagement with online instruction, and I posit that many new books will be published on this topic in the near future.
The topic of “digital distractions” is worthy of study in its own right going forward. While students have always had their share of distractions (I have colorful memories of my own while I was a student), the current generation seems addictively so, to the point that actually impedes effective learning of our rigorous discipline. We have all experienced the distracted student phenomenon in our classrooms and labs. The distraction seems to go well beyond the obvious factors including attachment to their peers, smartphones, and gaming systems. If my classroom observations are any guide, this is apparently a global trend.
While our ability to “un distract” our students is regrettably, very limited, we have the duty to address the behaviors that come in the way of effective learning. One area of concern is the abundance of learning materials, both good and bad, coexisting in the cyberspace. It is amazing how often a student would search online (on Google, YouTube, Chegg, Reddit, etc.) for information on an unfamiliar topic rather than lookup the prescribed / authoritative textbook. This behavior is unlikely to disappear suddenly. It is increasingly clear that simply asking students to study the authoritative sources is insufficient. As instructors, we must increasingly engage with our students and get to know these alternative information sources, and the students’ motivations for relying on these sub-standard sources. Regardless of where the blame lies, we must adapt to the learning needs of this generation, and do whatever it takes.
A salient, and frankly sad, aspect of online instruction is exam integrity. This is a crucial issue for all of us, since without adequate rigor and integrity in student testing, our degree certificates risk becoming worthless. Students have endless opportunities, temptations, and the means (e.g., Chegg.com) to obtain answers to exams. While our faculty invented a long list of methods, for example, randomizing questions, timed questions, lockdown browsers, watching sites like Chegg.com, etc., the most prominent thought that emerged was the following: Can we perform testing differently? The most promising approach going forward, may be to do away with traditional exam altogether, and focus on alternative, demonstrably more fool-proof student testing methods. Some faculty members have reported success with a viva voce interviews with students wherein they validated student exams that seemed suspicious. We have also found websites like Chegg.com to be willing to cooperate with us when we needed to investigate cheating on exams.
Another sad aspect of pandemic mode teaching has been a widening of inequalities, and the increased difficulty of helping the financially and academically weaker students. Interestingly, and frankly counter-intuitively, the main challenge in this regard is the difficulty of identifying these students with special in the first place. Our institutions have been very helpful when students asked for help, but they lack the means to identify the neediest students in a timely manner. These students do not always self-identify and seek help. We need to get better at identifying, tracking, and helping our weaker students, and students with special needs. Students of low socio-economic status were affected harder since they were less well equipped, suffered slower internet service, suffered greater anxiety with exams, some were unable to buy webcams. Many students also needed to work and/or assist their families in a variety of ways. Importantly, there was loss of peer community and support programs. Overall, I feel that we were not able to help them at the ideal level, and we must strengthen our outreach and support systems.
Going forward, it is inevitable the overwhelming majority of ECE courses can, and should be made accessible online. This will allow us to reach many more students than we currently are. This will entail new departmental revenue models, new staffing imperatives, and overall, fresh thinking of our core business.
Laboratories are a central aspect of ECE education, and they too are set to evolve. During the past year, we experimented with three primary strategies.
First, we encouraged and helped students to own their test and measurement equipment, as well as electronic parts – the “lab in a backpack” concept that we have discussed extensively over the years. This is a viable path forward, and may help regain the lost art of electronics tinkering among our students, meshing nicely with the makerspace movement.
An emerging strategy is to host equipment at our labs that can be accessed remotely – the idea of “robotic lab servers” a.k.a. “labs without lights”. This technology is promising as a way to make high-end equipment available to students, but does not yet seem like a viable stand-alone proposition. My guess is that it will most likely prove to be ideal in combination with a student-owned lab in a backpack.
Going forward, it is reasonable to expect that Student-owned/leased technology will find mainstream acceptance & adoption, well after the pandemic ends. But the kits need to achieve an altogether new level of capability, compactness, mobility, usability, and importantly, a tighter integration with textbooks and curricula. They will need mechanisms to ensure academic honesty, e.g., by adding unique ID numbers to instruments. They need to replicate the corporate workplace more authentically. Importantly they need to be built with extensive student input, and this is not yet the case.
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As the capabilities of mobile bench equipment grow, and their sizes and costs shrink, we may transition to a new era that could rekindle the lost art of tinkering & inventing. If the student-owned personal labs are consistently integrated into the curriculum, students may fall in love with them. They may become “cool” among the new generation. They may be less likely to sell their personal labs at the end of the program, and may even expand them passionately. New product ideas and startups may emerge from this love affair.
The Graduate Educational Picture
It is fair to state that our graduate students faced stresses like never before: Isolated, far from family, unable to travel, health challenges and even family deaths, being separated from labs, immigration related stresses, tough economy, funding uncertainty, .. etc. Nevertheless, and impressively, they persisted and prevailed, and transitioned to new careers. Going forward, I feel that we need a kinder, gentler environment in which to nurture these bright young minds.
From a business standpoint, we must prepare for a continuing drop in international students, the waning interest among many students in a U.S. Graduate education, and it may well be a time to pay a lot more attention to domestic students, especially the working professionals. We may start paying more attention to micro-credentialing and certificate courses.
The upheavals of the past two years make it possible all educational institutions to participate in this transformation. Going forward, it is fair to state that online technology-enabled education will become mainstream and permanent. Teaching styles and technologies will be reworked to achieve authentic engagement & integrity online, at scale. Our online-assisted programs will have a transformational impact on the U.S. workforce at all levels.
This revolution may well be guided by classical insights on learning, since they are rooted in our humanity. For example, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously stated that “Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks.
The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.” This is still true, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. All we need to do is to invent authentic learning experiences that require students to learn from doing.
As we noted earlier, engagement is still key to learning, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. All the technologies we adopt and all the skills we develop in using them must enhance authentic student-faculty engagement. We must invent fresh ways to motivate our students in a world full of digital distractions, promote active learning to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and bring in authentic relevance of subject matter into our newfangled future classrooms.
In summary, we have the opportunity to rethink, well, everything, for the future of ECE education. There are fresh new opportunities for growth and efficiency. The jolts and tumults of the past year may well have triggered an educational renaissance. The emerging scientific culture of communal open-source knowledge sharing may serve us well as we reinvent ECE education. This will require inventing new modes of student-teacher engagement, and create a new future educational marketplace.
One thing is for sure: the Future is Bright, but Hyper Competitive.
Best Wishes, and Stay Safe,
Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu