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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IEEE Houston Consultants Network
New Technologies for Improving Education
June 8th (Monday) 6:00 pm Business Meeting
McGovern-Stella Link Houston Public Library at 7405 Stella Link
The Houston Public Library does not sponsor or endorse this meeting. The library has a parking
lot with free parking. See attached map showing location of the library and photo showing the parking
area.
IEEE Houston Consultant Network members, IEEE Members, interested parties, students
and guests are all welcome! Please RSVP to tgcooper@sbcglobal.net.
Agenda
6:00 PM – Networking & Snacks
6:15 PM – Brief announcements and introduction of speaker
6:30 PM – Presentation followed by Q and A
7:45 PM – Adjourn and exit the building
C. Sidney Burrus
Professor Emeritus of ECE and former Dean of Engineering at Rice University
Presentation:
The presentation will look at MOOCs (massive open online courses) and OER (open educational
resources) along with other modern methods to improve access, improve quality, and reduce cost.
These new approaches promise to completely change education in general and engineering education in
particular. Skeptics say they are simply a fad and the traditional lecture-lab-homework-exam approach is
the best and should not be changed. But, many of the best universities in the world are seriously
developing online educational systems and numerous startup companies are being created to exploit
what they see as a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Dr. Burrus will show some results from many
universities, including Rice, on how these new ideas are changing higher education (Ga Tech offers a
$7K masters degree online)..
Speaker:
C. Sidney Burrus is the former Dean of Engineering, the
Maxfield-Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, and Senior Strategist of the
OpenStax/Connexions Project at Rice University in Houston,
Texas. Over the last 40 years, he has been Dean of
Engineering, Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department,
Director of a Research Institute, and Master of Lovett College at
Rice. He has authored 5 books and over 250 articles on Digital
Signal Processing, received teaching awards from Rice, and
received research awards from the IEEE (Institute of Electrical
and Electronic Engineers) and others. He received a senior
Humboldt Award in 1975 and was a senior Fulbright Fellow in
1979. His research has been supported by the NSF, DARPA,
AFOSR, NASA, and industrial grants. He is a Fellow of the
IEEE, Fellow of the AAAS, received the IEEE Kilby Medal, and
received the Association of Rice Alumni Gold Medal.
The OpenStax Connexions Project started in 1999 at Rice University to apply modern technology and
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theory to education. It has grown to be one of the most used Open Educational Resources (OER) in the
world. Burrus has been closely involved with it since its founding and has lectured and published widely
on it.
Prof. Burrus received his PhD from Stanford, has held visiting positions at MIT and the University of
Erlangen in Germany, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Beijing Jiaotong University. He was on the
founding committee for International University Bremen (Now named Jacobs University); is a consultant
on the founding of Tan Tao University in Vietnam; and is on the School of Science and Engineering
advisory board of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. He was one of
the founding teachers in the Indo-US Collaboration in Engineering Education (IUCEE) in India.
Maps:
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