Teaching electronics-ICT : from focus and structure to practical realizations

We present a four-year electronics-ICT educational master program at Ghent University in Belgium. The students develop knowledge and skills from novice to experienced electronic circuit designers. In the corresponding topics, the immersion into engineering problems is deepened. The horizontal and vertical alignment of courses in the four-year master program at our university is discussed. The curriculum of the four-year master program is highly projectoriented and all topics are clustered around a well-considered set of standards. This clustering supports the logical structure of the program, with students gradually acquiring the necessary competences. All standards and their mutual interaction are extensively discussed in the paper. We also focus on four design-implement projects included in the electronics-ICT program, explicitly following CDIO-guidelines. Whereas the first-year project has a limited level of difficulty, the challenges increase significantly in the course of the next years. Students learn that product design is an iterative process on different levels, where the design strategy can be changed continuously based on important and crucial feedback. Different evaluations have demonstrated that our students are not only aware of CDIO-principles, but are also convinced of the quality of the results obtained by following the standards

Transition UGent: a bottom-up initiative towards a more sustainable university

The vibrant think-tank ‘Transition UGent’ engaged over 250 academics, students and people from the university management in suggesting objectives and actions for the Sustainability Policy of Ghent University (Belgium). Founded in 2012, this bottom-up initiative succeeded to place sustainability high on the policy agenda of our university. Through discussions within 9 working groups and using the transition management method, Transition UGent developed system analyses, sustainability visions and transition paths on 9 fields of Ghent University: mobility, energy, food, waste, nature and green, water, art, education and research. At the moment, many visions and ideas find their way into concrete actions and policies. In our presentation we focused on the broad participative process, on the most remarkable structural results (e.g. a formal and ambitious Sustainability Vision and a student-led Sustainability Office) and on recent actions and experiments (e.g. a sustainability assessment on food supply in student restaurants, artistic COP21 activities, ambitious mobility plans, food leftovers projects, an education network on sustainability controversies, a transdisciplinary platform on Sustainable Cities). We concluded with some recommendations and reflections on this transition approach, on the important role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and student involvement, on lock-ins and bottlenecks, and on convincing skeptical leaders

Teaching Sustainability Analysis in Electronics Lecture Courses

Based on positive prior experiences teaching sustainability analysis in electronics laboratory courses, this work explores techniques for teaching sustainability analysis in lecture courses. As difficult as it may seem to incorporate sustainability into integrated circuit courses or other engineering courses, it may prove as easy as asking students to consider how the coursework relates to sustainability issues. The need to educate students “to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability” has gained sufficient value to deserve its own ABET Program Outcome, Criterion 3(c). This work presents a strategy to introduce students to the relevant issues before senior design coursework, thereby providing practice and enabling them to achieve such a program outcome more skillfully in senior level classes. Key practical challenges arise when attempting to add learning content to a one-quarter electronics course already bursting at the seams with conceptually challenging learning outcomes: 1. No extra class time exists in which to insert additional in-class activities; and 2. Few instructors desire the increased workload associated with reading dozens of additional student essays on top of normal assignment grading. To address the in-class time limitation, this work delivers the sustainability issues content online. To minimize excess faculty workload, this work presents a tool designed to assist faculty to use peer review of writing assignments, even in medium to large courses. Assessment data confirm the students assimilate new sustainability analysis skills

Undergraduate geotechnical engineering education of the 21st century

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Remote laboratory to support control theory

The Control Systems plays a vital role in the industry, which is the most essential application of the Electrical Engineering. The control concepts are present in most of the automation systems. The Control Systems theory is the key concept to achieve the automation and makes world faster. But, in reality the study of control engineering is decreased in the recent years, because of the difficulty in learning the concepts of the control theory. Most of the students feel difficult to understand theoretical concepts of control systems. The traditional teaching methodology is one way of teaching control systems concepts. Even though books are proper way of teaching control systems in a systematic way, we need additional tool to create interaction between the subject and the students. The teaching platform is worth to analyse the possibility to add or complement the way of standing with means able to add Real evidences. In another way, it is important that the provided lab experiment should be affordable. The teaching platform to support control theory has been introduced with set of experiments to create Real evidences, and manuals to carry out those experiments, slides to have a guidance and Graphical User Interface (GUI) to have an interaction with the control system is provided