Improvement Of An Electrical Engineering Course Offered To Non Electrical Engineering Majors

ECE3183 Electrical Engineering Systems is a survey course offered by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) to non-majors in all other engineering departments at Mississippi State University (MSU). A challenge in most service courses is how to motivate the students to learn. A primary reason that the students struggle in this class is that they do not understand the link between the knowledge in ECE3183 and their majors. To addressing this situation, a faculty member in the ECE department works closely with faculty in other engineering departments to incorporate major-related applications into lectures by the design of application-oriented examples. In this paper, we report an initial effort made by the ECE and Mechanical Engineering (ME) faculty to improve the teaching and learning effectiveness in ECE3183. The ME department was selected because they provide approximately 40% of the student population to ECE3183. Based on the experience and lessons learned from this initial effort, this concept will be extended to other departments in the near future.