Bridging the Intellectual Divide: Integrating Research and Education via the Vertically-Integrated Projects Program
Speaker
Edward Coyle
Arbutus Chair for the Integration of Research and Education and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Georgia Tech
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Video
Video link
Description
Let’s be honest … most faculty join universities like CMU to pursue fame and fortune in research; not to teach undergraduates. Most undergraduates rarely get to know any faculty and typically have little awareness of what they and their graduate students do besides deliver boring lectures and reluctantly hold office hours. A great opportunity for bright, energetic and creative students to contribute in a meaningful way to faculty members’ research projects is thus wasted. This intellectual divide thus prevents faculty and undergraduates from truly benefiting from each other.
The goal of the Vertically-Integrated Projects (VIP) program is to bridge this divide. Its innovative curricular structure overcomes the atomization of education into disciplines, semesters, and courses by enabling the creation and perpetual renewal of large, multidisciplinary teams of undergraduates. Its unique project selection process results in design projects that excite and challenge undergraduates and have sufficient depth to benefit a faculty member’s research effort.
Two VIP projects—the eStadium and eDemocracy projects—will be used to illustrate the breadth and depth of the program. They also demonstrate the many ways that VIP projects achieve significant outcomes in: project-based learning; development, deployment and commercialization of research ideas; service learning; attraction and retention of under-represented minorities; teaching professional skills; multi-disciplinary education; curriculum integration; and encouraging undergraduates to attend graduate school.
Speaker's Bio
Edward J. Coyle received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1978 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1982. From 1982 through 2007, he was a faculty member at Purdue University, where he served at various times as assistant vice provost for research, co-director of the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications, and co-founder of both the Vertically-Integrated Projects (VIP) program and the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. Dr. Coyle joined Georgia Tech in 2008 where he is currently the Arbutus Chair for the Integration of Research and Education and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He has received a variety of awards, including the 1997 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering.
Speaker's Website
http://www.ece.gatech.edu/faculty-staff/fac_profiles/bio.php?id=157
Host
Matthew Kam