General Considerations

6.1 General Considerations

A computer engineering program requires a great variety of knowledge, practical skills, transferable skills, and attitudes that need consideration within the one single framework. A program should exhibit an obvious and consistent ethos that permeates a complete program of study. Students who enjoy and respond to particular approaches can be confident that they will continue to enjoy and be successful at the more advanced levels.

One key issue is how to distribute, among the years of study, relatively settled material (e.g., circuits or supporting mathematics courses) versus material that is more recent. Computer engineering is a discipline in which the rate of change is very swift and this is likely to continue. Traditional approaches to course design suggest that fundamental and core material should appear at the start of a program. By its very nature, the logic of this is that this material should exhibit a level of permanence and durability and should be unlikely to change over the lifetime of the program. Then students can build on these foundations as they move forward to the later parts of the program and continue as lifelong learners.

This view requires tempering by consideration of the students’ point of view. Students who choose to study computer engineering are often motivated by the hands-on nature of engineering, as well as their prior experience with computers. During their initial academic terms, if students only take courses on mathematics and science, without obvious computer engineering applications, it may create a situation of frustration and disillusionment. It is desirable to position topics involving very new topics in the later years. These new topics are often at the forefront of research and development and after studying them, students can genuinely claim to be up-to-date in their subject area. That is important since they enter industry or employment as the agents of technology change and transfer. Other considerations will also influence the characteristics of a particular degree program. These considerations include:

• Local needs (institutional or regional) • Needs of an increasingly diverse student population, and • Interests and background of the faculty

In some cases, an institution may want to design a computer engineering degree program that focuses on one specific area of computer engineering or perhaps gives students a choice among a few such areas. A variety of specialized degree programs is perfectly achievable within the general framework. Included, for example, would be degrees with particular orientations in areas such as computer communications, embedded computer systems, system level integration, mobile computing systems, computer systems design, computer devices, digital signal processing, multi-media systems, computing and broadcasting, pervasive computing, high integrity computing systems, and real-time systems.

Another consideration is how many modules can be designed specifically for computer engineering students and how many will be shared with either (or both) computer science or electrical engineering curricula. For instance, institutions may construct a computer engineering curriculum with one of the following alternative options.

• There may be enough students in computer engineering to justify the provision of specialist courses devised • There may be enough students in computer engineering to justify the provision of specialist courses devised

engineering curricula with additional selected classes being mounted specifically to address the specialist topics for computer engineering students

• Additional possibilities also exist depending on local arrangements and circumstances