Assistant Professor Robert Heath

Assistant Professor Robert Heath

In January 2002, ECE Assistant Professor Robert Heath came to our engineering program because of the quality of our research endeavors. Once here, however, he saw that UT's engineering school good reputation is based not only on its research, but also on its teaching. He realized first hand how difficult it is to incorporate new teaching techniques into his signal processing classes where information is often highly theoretical and involves doing derivations. He became keenly aware that a "good teacher is an efficient one" because of the many demands on his time. Robert has found that the support and encouragement of the Faculty Innovation Center enables him to experiment with active-learning techniques and to find ways to document classroom experiences.

Working with FIC director Kathy Schmidt, Robert wanted to try to engage his students to take a more active classroom role . Students in his Advanced Digital Signal Processing graduate course assembled technology-based projects to be used by other students in this class and in future years. As with most educational endeavors, there were challenges to developing the student-generated educational projects and course demos. Robert and Kathy gathered student data on the results and on students' perceptions of the process and submitted a paper to the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE).

Attending an engineering educational conference was novel for Robert and he did it in style as an FIE New Faculty Fellow. The FIE New Faculty Fellows were given travel awards to attend the conference to be "exposed to the latest and greatest in engineering educational practices" as well as to hear from leaders in the engineering educational field. Close to 100 faculty applied for one of the ten positions and to see a listing of the winners go to: http://www.fie-conference.org/03/fellows.html Robert found that while "it might be hard to explain to my fellow faculty that I spent four days at an engineering educational conference, I found that it was very worthwhile." Robert realizes that enhancing teaching requires time and effort, but he believes it benefits not only the students, but the teacher as well.