The IEC Exchange: A Platform for Information Dissemination, Collaborations, News, Spotlights, and More...
Letter from the Editor
Dear IEC Community,

With the new academic year comes a new beginning that ushers in new initiatives, expectations, and challenges. It then seems appropriate to include in this September mini-issue a letter that reminds us of the opportunities this newsletter presents for informing and engaging our community by serving as a platform for disseminating information between IEC members, and also as a conduit for sharing relevant news and collaboration opportunities. We envision that these fruitful exchanges of ideas will result in our effective functioning as that “super department” that would allow us to engage more effectively in innovative and/or large-scale initiatives and better tackle our common challenges.

Although our inaugural issue was distributed nine months ago, the IEC Exchange remains a quarterly publication. The long hiatus was due to the COVID-19 realities that, as we all are painfully aware of, have disrupted agendas, operations, and lives. We felt the need to reboot the process with the new academic year by re-introducing the newsletter through this short issue that will be followed by our first full-length issue at the end of October. 


Mandoye Ndoye
Tuskegee University
Calendar of Events
Sept. 30, 2020 at 2:00 pm ET
ECE Lab Pros Network Call
Contact Claire Seifert for details cseifert@ecedha.org

Oct. 1, 2020
IEC Online Mini-Workshop
Contact Claire Seifert for details cseifert@ecedha.org

Oct. 22, 2020
IEC Online Mini-Workshop
Contact Claire Seifert for details cseifert@ecedha.org

Nov. 5, 2020
IEC Online Mini-Workshop
Contact Claire Seifert for details cseifert@ecedha.org

Dec. 1-2, 2020
ECEDHA Lab Pros Network Summit
Contact Claire Seifert for details cseifert@ecedha.org
IEC Project Updates
Kofi Nyarko
Morgan State University
Summer 2020 Smart City Research Experience for Undergraduates and Teachers

Earlier this year, the Smart City Research Experience for Undergraduates and Teachers program, SCR2, was met with a significant challenge when it was clear that most universities in the country would switch to remote instruction for the remainder of the Spring term. This meant participants of summer programs would most likely be restricted from on campus activities. While other summer programs made the decision to cancel their programs for the year, the SCR2 organizers decided to leverage this experience as a learning opportunity and proceed with the program, albeit, with some critical modifications.  

RAPID Project

Ken Connor
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The RAPID Project, which I have reported on previously, is making good progress. We have collected some very interesting data from most IEC partner institutions on the switch to online instruction that occurred in the spring. We also have good data from this summer’s Smart Cities REU/RET (aka SCR2) research program. Thank you to everyone for being so responsive and encouraging your students to also participate. We will be conducting some additional surveys this fall and hope that the response will be as good. The results of this study will be presented at ASEE meetings and in future IEC newsletters. The first formal presentation will be at an ASEE Webinar on Supporting Underrepresented Students Post-COVID to be scheduled in October.
Project RECET

Ken Connor
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Most IEC member departments are well acquainted with the value of sharing course content because of their experiences participating in the Experiment Centric Pedagogy project. It is the success of that project that led to the formation of our new organization, the IEC. Thus, when a group of people from both the academy and industry met this summer to figure out how best to use the kind of technology and pedagogy that drove the ECP project to address the extraordinary circumstances we face as engineering educators during the COVID-19 pandemic, no one should be surprised to learn that the IEC had a seat at the table. It has been my honor to represent our great organization in discussions with Analog Devices, North Carolina State University, and the Universities of Wisconsin and New Mexico that have now resulted in Project-RECET.
Corporate Features
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Find out more at: www.keysight.com/find/bode.
IEC Corporate Members