A Comprehensive, Laboratory Enhanced Communications Curriculum

Over the past decade, the field of wireless communications has come into its own and is posed to become a ubiquitous technology with the recent arrival of 3G cellular, wireless local area networks and wireless sensor networks. As such, today’s graduating electrical engineers need marketable skills which are typically not developed in undergraduate curricula. This paper presents ongoing activities at the University of Vermont (UVM) which address this need through significant enhancements in the undergraduate communications curriculum offered by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE). The emphasis of these enhancements lies in the integration of hands-on experience in three typically, theory-based telecommunication courses and a separate laboratory course having a wireless communications focus. The enhancements, enabled by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Adaptation and Implementation (A&I) Track award and university support, features infrastructure development in terms of radio frequency (RF) and digital communications test equipment. This paper describes the new communications curriculum at UVM, resources upon which the curriculum enhancements were based, the development of two new instructional laboratory benches and the adaptation of laboratory assignments to enhance the new curriculum. UVM’s ECE program is relatively small (~100 undergraduates) and thus the presented approach may serve a model for similarly sized departments.