Redesign Of An Undergraduate Analog Integrated Circuits Course

Abstract

This paper presents a redesign project of the course "E-95-863-Analog Integrated Circuits" that is taken by junior students of the Electronics and Communications Engineering (IEC) Program at ITESM campus Monterrey. This redesign project includes a pedagogical procedure before its implementation with a pilot group of students. This complete pedagogical procedure consists of the following parts: educative intentions, objectives, general contents that includes a contents block diagram, profile of the IEC program, IEC study plan, curricular map showing the courses serving E-95-863 as well as the the courses served by E-95-863, conceptual contents, procedural contents, attitudinal contents, learning strategies and course activities. Some of the learning techniques used in the course are: Interactive exposition of topics (from 16 to 20 hours per semester), Internal group activities (11 during the semester), homework done by external groups (8 during the semester), monthly projects that include report writing and oral presentations done by external groups (3 during the semester), self-study reading assignments and discussion (14 during the semester), office consulting and virtual consulting. The course has been mounted on the "Learning Space®" educational shell that runs under the Lotus Notes® data base program. The shell provides 4 virtual environments available (through the WWW) to students and instructors: "profile", "media center", "course room" and "schedule". For instructors an additional environment, the "assessment", is available in order to develop exams, surveys, and quizzes. The implementation phase using this scheme started in the Fall of 1997. In the Spring of 1998, the course was taught with some improvements after receiving some feedback from students, professors and from the pedagogical associate. In the Fall of 1998, two sections of the course are being taught using this redesign strategy. The implementation results after 2 semesters has shown, on the students, a significant positive impact in 8 procedural and 5 attitudinal contents established in the Mission of ITESM toward the year 2005. However, for the pilot groups of 17 (fall 1997) and 21 (spring 1998) students, the instructor has observed a significant increase in the teaching load compared to the traditional scheme. This is due to the detailed personalized formative and summative evaluations for each student and the continuous attendance to the discussion virtual environment such as "the course room". Further refinements are developed in order to fit the scheme to the typical teaching loads required for the traditional courses at ITESM.