Committee work occupies a lot of my time. The committees requiring the greatest amount of time are Academic Assessment, which I chair, and Recruitment. Academic assessment requires that students in each of seven core courses be administered an assessment quiz, quantifying the material they have learned. This process has led to important improvements in the master syllabi and hence in doing a quality job of teaching these courses.

 

Another professor and I share responsibility for the recruitment committee. This committee requires travel to multiple sites on and off campus to recruit quality students for the ECIT Department. These committees eat into nights and weekends. I am also chair of the Department Chair Evaluation Committee, and am on the School of Technology Graduate Committee. Additionally, I’m the graduate coordinator for Information Technology concentration, School of Technology curriculum committee, and Futures Committee.

 

I am one of the advisors for our IEEE Student chapter. Recently the students built a robot for a competition in Memphis, Tenn. Weekly meetings throughout the fall semester were devoted to planning, and many late nights in the spring semester were spent helping students construct the robot. A colleague and I stayed late nights and weekends to allow the students access to the labs.

 

No one week is typical, though my course load is one constant. Two of them, Digital Circuits I and Mechatronics, are face-to-face, while another section of Digital Circuits is online. The 110-minute lectures are scheduled on Monday and labs on Wednesday. The lectures are video taped for future use. Preparation for the lecture and the lab portion starts the prior week. Often additional time is needed on weekends and early Monday morning prior to the initial lecture at 10 a.m. I usually post a skeleton of the lecture notes on Blackboard for the students. Students fill in notes on the skeleton during scheduled lectures. These skeleton notes are reviewed and updated from prior semesters to improve them from year to year.

 

About 10 hours a week of office hours, student advising, and conference attendance fill out a typical week.