A NEW DIRECTION IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING PROJECT-DRIVEN CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

The traditional electrical engineering curriculum development methodologies follow a 3-step sequence to create: 1. learning objectives for a specific course, 2. lecture plan, 3. laboratory experiments. The experiments are created or re-used from laboratory manuals or text books more or less as an afterthought, a fact even more evident by the credit assignment: 3 to 4 credits to the lecture, and only I credit to the laboratory. Our philosophy is to switch steps 2 and 3. We propose to design the experiments first to meet the learning objectives and to motivate students, and then create the lecture plan to provide knowledge to students "just in time" to perform the experiments. This methodology essentially combines a project-driven curriculum development philosophy, the pervasive presence of PCs. and the availability of low-cost instrumentation tool kits to create low-level electrical engineering courses that offer truly hands-on laboratory experience to distance-learning students at another university. at our university campus and especially at home.