Collaborative Research: CI­TEAM Implementation Project: 

The Signal Processing Education Network  

Rice University PI: Richard G. Baraniuk 

Co‐PIs: C. Sidney Burrus, Don H. Johnson, Moshe Y. Vardi, and Mark Embree Senior Personnel: Jan E. Odegard, and Kathi Fletcher 

Georgia Institute of Technology PI: James H. McClellan; Co‐PI: Justin Romberg 

Rose­Hulman Institute of Technology PI: Mark A. Yoder; Co‐PI: Wayne T. Padgett 

University of Texas at El Paso PI: Richardo von Borries; Co‐PI:  Patricia A. Nava 

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education PI: Lisa Petrides; Senior Personnel: Cynthia Jimes 

 

Proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation (Program Solicitation: NSF 10-532).

Contact information: Jan E. Odegard, Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, Rice University, K2I MS-39, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005;

Email: odegard@rice.edu; Phone: 713.348.3128; Fax: 866.596.1062

April 27, 2010

For limited distribution 

Summary

There exists today a crisis throughout engineering education, and cyberinfrastructure education in particular: enrollments are decreasing, many students are ill-prepared and disengaged, and faculty are pressured to cover an increasing volume of material. Curricula have become stove-piped and disconnected, in spite of research indicating that science and engineering education best resonates with women and underrepresented minority students when clear connections are drawn to transformative applications and other fields of study. Industry routinely lobbies for better engineering graduates that are at ease when collaborating on teams, and eager to attack hands-on design challenges.

The academic/industrial/professional society partnership we propose between Rice University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at El Paso, National Instruments, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Processing Society directly attacks these issues by aiming to revolutionize the way we teach and learn about cyberinfrastructure. We are guided by a common vision: to prepare the cyberinfrastructure leaders of tomorrow, we must break away from the traditional textbook, lecture, homework-based approach to education, and build a new framework where a vibrant network of educators, students, and field practitioners continually interact, collaborate, connect, and explore interactive content.

The innovative aspects and scientific merits of this collaborative project lie in our new approach to building and sustaining virtual educational communities around interactive content and applying the results to the full spectrum of engineering education venues: university undergraduate and graduate courses, industrial training and continuing education, just-in-time on the job learning, and high-school laboratories. Our research focuses on one strategic discipline in engineering, signal processing, and involves and balances education, community development, technology development, marketing and business planning, and impact assessment.

The specific objectives of the project are to:

1. Implement a light-weight Technology Framework that enables faculty and student users to exploit and expand upon the existing signal processing education content;

2. Build a signal processing Education Network of champions from faculty, students, and industry leaders nationwide that continually expands, improves, and diversifies the materials and that promotes the use of the framework both at network member institutions and at institutions in the wider engineering education community;

3. Assess the effectiveness of the framework and network for accelerating adoption and use as well as the value of the mentoring and support provided by the network of champions;

4. Widely Disseminate the results and lessons learned.

Broader impacts of this research include the development of people-resources and technologies that will substantially increase the performance and capabilities of engineering educators, effectively opening up engineering education for motivated self-learners in all parts of the nation as well as the world. In particular, education in digital signal processing and related technologies is critical in sustaining many high-tech industries. Finally, digital signal processing educators, practitioners and students will be brought together to form dynamic knowledge sharing communities that greatly impact education not only on their home campuses but around the world.

1. Vision and Goals 1.1 Motivation and significance “Excellence in science and mathematics education is a critical need and goal for the United States” [NRC01]. Unfortunately, there exists today a crisis throughout engineering education, and cyberinfrastructure (CI) education in particular: enrollments are decreasing, many students are ill-prepared and disengaged, and faculty are pressured to cover an increasing volume of material. Curricula have become stove-piped and disconnected, in spite of research indicating that science and engineering education best resonates with women and underrepresented minority students when clear connections are drawn to transformative applications and other fields of study. In fact, the retention rate for degree-seeking female and minority engineering students is only around only 40% [NAE]. Industry regularly complains that typical engineering graduates lack the fundamental ability to collaborate in teams, and struggle with hands-on design challenges. Nevertheless, lifelong learning in CI for engineers and scientists has been identified as critical to the nation’s future economic competitiveness [N1,Aca,Edu,Ste,Dun]. The academic/industrial/professional society partnership we propose between Rice University (Rice), Georgia Institute of Technology (GA-Tech), Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RH), the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), National Instruments (NI), Texas Instruments (TI), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Processing Society (IEEE-SPS) directly attacks these issues by aiming to revolutionize the way we teach and learn about CI. We are guided by a common vision: to prepare the CI leaders of tomorrow, we must break away from the traditional textbook, lecture, homework-based approach to education, and build a new framework where a vibrant network of educators, students, and field practitioners continually interact, collaborate, connect, and explore interactive content. Our disciplinary focus for this education project is the field of signal processing (SP), a critical component of both many CI systems and all electrical and computer engineering (ECE) curricula, nationwide and worldwide. SP technologies are embedded in a host of important, fast-moving applications, including cell phones and a host of other communication and networking systems; MP3, JPEG, and MPEG coding for digital audio, cameras, and television; medical imaging scanners; radar and sonar systems; remote sensing satellites; and antilock braking systems, to name just a few. Thanks to new software tools and ever advancing computing power, SP applications can make otherwise bland engineering mathematics come alive via the sights and sounds of multimedia. Signal Processing provides an especially attractive setting for a project of this kind, since SP courses are taught today at every college level; SP is even trickling into high schools [I1,Ors]. For example, co-PIs James McClellan and Mark Yoder's textbooks DSP First [Mc2] and Signal Processing First [Mc4] have been adopted for sophomore and junior level ECE courses at 180 universities in the USA and some 60 other countries worldwide; co-PI Don Johnson's textbook Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering [Jo1] is used at the sophomore level in ECE at Rice; PI Baraniuk's Signals and Systems textbook is used at the junior level in ECE at Rice; and co-PI Sidney Burrus' textbooks Digital Filter Design [Bu1] and FFT Algorithms [Bu2] are used at the senior and graduate level in ECE at Rice. Hence we expect broad use and adoption of the artifacts and findings of this project across multiple scales (grade levels) and that our findings will be replicable and scalable to both the national and global level. We also expect our approach to readily translate to other key domains of CI education. 1.2 Challenges We contend is that in order to properly educate the cyberinfrastructure leaders of today and tomorrow, we must challenge the centuries-old, ingrained paradigm of college education based on paper textbooks, periodic lectures, and weekly homework assignments and laboratories. The textbook, lecture, homework, and laboratory have traditionally been the fundamental tools of university teaching. A text serves as a repository of facts and information and provides the recommended structure and sequence for lecturing and learning. Today, textbooks can be in traditional paper form or electronically available online [Cla].

However, the material in CI, including SP, changes rapidly as new theory, applications, and hardware continually arrive. In some ways, having a textbook as a course’s main tool actually impedes course and curriculum development, especially with regards to reaching out to diverse student audiences. Problems with this standard educational practice include the following: Sequential and inflexible: All paper and most web-based textbooks, lectures, and assignments cover topics sequentially, which both misleads and bores students. Students are following a curriculum and taking several courses at once, but the cross-fertilization of ideas present in their daily collegiate lives is not reflected in their courses, either intellectually or pedagogically. The self-contained nature of courses resulting from reliance on an inflexible text inhibits holistic curriculum development and cross-fertilization by obscuring the connections among the range of courses that make up a discipline. Further, existing texts provide inflexible, off-the-rack content that caters to only a single learning style and is often “not quite right” for the instructor’s needs. Static and inefficient: Under the current development model, textbooks and other course materials are developed by a single author or small team; they take years to write, reach bookstores, and undergo revision. Only a small proportion of potential authors ever contribute to the body of published materials due to the large time commitment; this greatly reduces pedagogical diversity. Passive: A growing number of studies have demonstrated that learning is enhanced when instructors incorporate teaching strategies that are interactive and inquiry-based, and emphasize real problems and applications [Alev,Chi,Don1,Don2]. Yet, most undergraduate engineering courses taught in research-universities continue to predominantly feature a paper textbook and the instructor as lecturer [Mitc]. The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University noted that most undergraduates simply receive what is served to them, as they passively listen, transcribe, absorb and repeat in course after course [Bo1]. Little has changed since then; today, only about 20% of Research-I and -II universities provide opportunities for active learning, rapid feedback, or real-world problem solving in a substantial number of introductory science courses [Mitc]. Missing Components: Most existing textbooks in a mathematical subject area like SP concentrate exclusively on the presentation of abstract topics, so there is little or no support for projects on real applications, laboratory exercises, or interactive demos for learning. Life-long learning by practicing engineers is inhibited by this deficit. A few supplementary texts have been written to address this problem [Mc2,Bu3], but there is a lack of support for both instructors and students. When several different closely related texts exist, the Internet would facilitate supplementary labs and project modules if the appropriate linking between modules and texts were developed. Inaccessible: The unavoidable biases introduced into teaching and learning materials by authors from Research-I universities can make their materials virtually unusable at colleges serving more diverse populations. Moreover, recent studies have shown that textbook prices have risen over four times faster than the rate of inflation [St1]. This not only exerts tremendous economic pressure on students; it also encourages students to sell their books immediately after use, precluding the development of a personal reference library. Most course materials remain off limits to practitioners in industry, despite the great need for lifelong learning in CI that has been identified as critical to the nation's future economic competitiveness [N1,Aca,Edu,Ste,Dun]. There thus exists both a great need and a great opportunity for new CI technologies that support the development and delivery of quality, up-to-date educational materials that show that knowledge is a dynamic continuum stretching across disciplines, languages and cultures. Ideally, many authors should contribute to a knowledge repository from which individual instructors and/or learners can create a customized course text that will better reach their students. The resulting “book” should freely reference ideas and applications arising from both related and diverse fields and should enable and foster active learning via exploration, problem solving, and experimentation. How the material is presented should be decoupled from the way the material is stored, supporting both present and future display technologies, and encouraging the evolving organization of course content.

1.3 Our coordinated response In her 2000 address to the American Educational Research Association, Catherine Lewis stated, “The graveyards of US educational reform are littered with once-promising innovations that were poorly understood, superficially implemented and consequently pronounced ineffective.” By design, we intend this project to be different. We are not claiming to have a panacea for all problems of education in general or even engineering education in particular. Rather we focus on implementing, disseminating, and assessing a new network-based approach to SP education that fuses into one program a number of components that have been developed, tested, and proven independently and on various scales over the last decade. The program leverages our large base of faculty and industry collaborators and contacts and significant SP teaching experience (175+ cumulative years among the PIs), our significant experience using CI technologies for exploration and experimentation in education, our significant experience with a platform for interactive tutoring, and an already active virtual network of SP educators and students. Connexions: Founded by PI Baraniuk at Rice in 1999, Connexions is an open-access repository of free scholarly materials and an open-source software toolkit to help authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, and learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. Each month, Connexions serves over 1.7 million unique users from over 190 countries. Connexions already features a substantial core of SP educational materials for freshman through graduate courses contributed by faculty at Rice, GA-Tech, RH, UTEP, and authors worldwide that has been used over 20 million times in the last several years [Lens]. In this project, we will create a national SP Educators Network (SPEN) with a focus on building a support community that will mine and diversify this core content so that it can reach an even broader base of students. The network faculty will, as needed, develop a limited amount of new materials that will serve to bridge gaps between their students and SP First and other SP textbooks in Connexions. Finally, under the auspices of an existing IEEE SPS collaboration, the network will also produce enhanced teaching artifacts in the form of quality evaluation and metadata mark-up of the existing and diversified materials, which will not only help instructors select the right content for their course and student audience, but also provide timely feedback to authors. Interactive Lablets: LabVIEW is a personal computer-based SP system developed by NI for interactively visualizing, processing, and interacting with multimedia such as audio, images, and video from a wide range of applications. For the past five years, co-PIs Yoder and Padgett have been developing and perfecting a suite of dozens of LabVIEW “Lablets” that make SP concepts come alive and encourage experimentation, exploration, and design. Yoder’s Lablets have been developed for the SP First textbook [Mc4], where they are heavily used not only in courses that adopt SP First, but also many other SP courses. Yoder and Padgett have also developed the companion website for Discrete-Time SP by Oppenheim and Schafer [Opp]. In this project, we will engage the SP education network to customize and integrate this critical mass of interactive elements Connexions for use in courses. Question/Response System: GA-Tech has developed and deployed a signal processing question and response system (SPQR) in their core undergraduate SP class based on the SP First (its.vip.gatech.edu). This course annually enrolls 500 students. Over 1200 SP problems and solutions are available in the SPQR database; all are tagged with metadata that links them into the textbook. In this project, we will integrate the SPQR with Connexions and engage the faculty network to diversify the database by both contributing new problems and authoring Connexions modules that describe new solution approaches to existing problems. 1.4 Objectives of this CI-Team project The overarching goal of this CI-Team Implementation Project is to fuse our significant prior, tested work on Connexions, interactive Lablets, and the SPQR into an integrated framework that addresses the primary roadblocks to improved CI education. Moreover, we will build a broad, vibrant network of faculty and students around the framework that continually expands, improves, and diversifies the materials. The specific objectives of this project are to:

• Implement a light-weight technology framework (a kind of “textbook 2.0”) that enables faculty and student users to exploit and expand upon the significant corpus of SP education content in Connexions, interactive LabVIEW Lablets, and problems and answers in the SPQR;

• Build a SP Education Network (SPEN) of champions from SP faculty, students, and industry leaders nationwide that continually expands, improves, and diversifies the materials and that promotes the use of the framework both at their institution and other institutions;

• Widely Disseminate the results and lessons learned; • Assess the effectiveness of the framework and network for accelerating adoption and use as well

as the value of the mentoring and support provided by the network of champions; Our implementation resonates with recent Obama Administration policies regarding open access and open standards for education [Ra1]. Connexions was one of the first such platforms, and eleven years after its founding, remains one of the largest open educational resources (OER) in the world. All content in Connexions is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license [CC], which is the most open license that still retains attribution to the authors of the material. All content in Connexions is encoded in XML, an open standard of the W3C [XML], and the software powering Connexions is open source [Rh]. The source code (“block diagrams”) of the LabVIEW Lablets will be made freely available, and GA-Tech's SPQR is based on QTI, the IMS standard for questions and answers [QTI]. We strongly believe that progress, higher levels of success and transformation of CI education depends on three critical factors: (1) open access to active online content that can be adopted and replicated across multiple scales, (2) access to a domain where a specific community of educators and learners are drawn from across the educational ecosystem work together to share best practices, enhance online material and mentor educators and learners; and (3) the ability to leverage the synergies between academics, industry, and professional societies. To this end, we have assembled (1) three key complementary technology projects that, when combined and made available online, reinforce each other where the whole is larger than the sum of the parts, (2) a team of expert SP educators with over 175+ cumulative years of SP teaching experience serving as the core of a vibrant SP education network (mentoring community) with expertise in (a) open-access, web and database repository technologies, (b) engineering leadership education and outreach to diverse populations, (c) experts in SP textbook and tool marketing, and (d) experts in sustainability of open access enterprises, and (3) an advisory council comprised of educational and industrial leaders completes the project team. 1.5 Expected impacts The innovative aspects and scientific merits of this project include our tightly integrated team; our engagement of not only instructors and students but also practicing engineers in the SP community; our deep reach into underdeveloped parts of nation and world; the openness of our intellectual property licensing (free content that is commercially reusable plus free, open-source software); the extent and depth of our concept exploration capabilities via Lablets; and the breadth and depth of problems and solutions in the SPQR. The lessons learned from this project will be closely watched by academic institutions, companies, and a range of different open-content and open-source projects. Our approach can also be translated easily into other CI content domains besides SP, from high performance computing to computational science and engineering, to networking and beyond. The broader impacts of this work include the development of personnel and technologies that will substantially increase the performance and capabilities of CI educators, and will open up education into underdeveloped parts of the nation and the world. While our CI-Team approach is being developed as an innovative way to teach engineering students about signal processing, it has real potential to enable a revolutionary advance in the world’s standard of education at all levels and in all disciplines. Moreover, as they grow and spread, open access projects like Connexions will likely have a large impact on the academic world itself. They promise to disintermediate the scholarly publishing industry, in the process rendering some current business models unviable and enabling new viable ones. It will also change the way we conceive of and pursue authorship, teaching, peer review, and promotion and tenure. It is a leading platform for “personalized learning,” which was recently identified as one of NAE’s Grand

Challenges for Engineering [NAE] and “lifelong learning,” which a recent NAE report reiterated as crucial to the USA’s economic competitiveness [N1]. By encouraging contributions from anyone, anywhere, our project has the potential to aid in the democratization of the world of knowledge. 2. Integration of Research and Learning This partnership aims to revolutionize the way we teach CI across science and engineering. Our common vision is that in order to prepare future scientific and engineering leaders of tomorrow we must break away from traditional textbook and lecture-based education and towards a new framework where a vibrant network of educators, students, and field practitioners continually interacts, collaborates, connects, and explores interactive content. Students in more traditional settings will have an unprecedented opportunity to observe the backgrounds and learning needs of engineers in the “real world.” In this section we describe the key components of our approach, each of which has been deployed and tested over several years. 2.1 Connexions The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a growing movement of concerned educators and scientists who aim to open up access to the world’s knowledge resources. Inspired by parallel developments in the open-source software world (e.g., Linux [Ra]), this movement seeks to provide free access to quality teaching materials that are amenable to customization and personalization to match local contexts (language, level, etc.). Moreover, this movement seeks to link and empower local educators in a global knowledge community that can efficiently and benefit and propagate the materials. Connexions (cnx.org) was founded in 1999 by PI Baraniuk and is now one of the world’s most popular open education resources, with over 1.7 million unique users per month from over 190 countries [Bar1,Bar2,App,Henr,Sel,Wak,Wak2,Ra,Blu,Buc,Edi,Edi2,Holl]. The SP content alone in Connexions has been used over 20 million times. Connexions users use the platform to form communities to create new, interactive educational content; to publish it in a variety of formats; to translate content into languages other than English; and to encourage a flow ideas and applications between the academy and the “real world.” Just as importantly, Connexions makes possible with educational materials what engineers do on a daily basis: iterate and innovate. Rather than stagnating in a textbook, engineering content in Connexions can be improved upon through a series of feedback loops, engaging both learners and teachers. Connexions was conceived as an inter-university enterprise, and currently 95% of its content has been contributed by authors outside Rice University. The architecture they designed and developed starting in 1999 includes features that were years ahead of their time, including:

• Modular, Lego-block organization of educational content that not only indicates the manifold nonlinear interconnections between ideas, but also makes the content easier to author (write a module in an evening rather than a textbook in a year) by a larger group of contributors (not just university faculty but engineers and policy makers in the real world), easier to update and keep correct (especially useful for fast-moving areas like engineering), and easier to mix together (to build a customized textbook for a course rather than use one “off the rack”). See Figure 1. In April 2010 Connexions hosts over 16000 total modules and nearly 1000 course collections.

• Semantic XML markup of the modular educational blocks makes content use and re-use as easy. Connexions modules can be displayed as an individual Web page, woven seamlessly into many different courses, converted to PDF for printing, or even processed through a speech synthesizer to accurately read material to the blind or illiterate.

• Collaborative workspaces that support collaboration and community building throughout the authoring, course-building, and learning processes.

• Open licenses to make the Connexions content not only free but also safe to share and re-use worldwide. In Connexions, authors retain the copyright on their materials but make them freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution open-content license [CC,Les1,Les2,Les3,Kel]. The license allows anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute Connexions modules and courses as

long as they attribute the original author(s). To take the guesswork out of what users can and cannot do with the content, the license information is embedded directly into the XML source of each and every Connexions module and collection.

• Quality control via post-publication peer review. Since the traditional peer review process would not scale to the eventual large size and activity level of Connexions, the platform features “lenses” that enable users to preferentially locate and view materials endorsed by third parties, such as professional societies, educational organizations, or publishers. One such lens is being developed and deployed by the IEEE-SPS especially for SP content.

• Inexpensive print-on-demand editions, since paper books will continue to be important for years to come. Connexions print textbooks cost a small fraction of their counterparts from large publishers. For example, the 320 page introductory electrical engineering textbook used at Rice University sells for just $22.

Modularity and open-content substantially lowers the barrier to entry into the author community. Prof. Douglas Jones at the University of Illinois observed: “For years I have wanted to write a textbook, because I love to write about FFTs. However, any complete text in my field also has to cover z-transforms, on which I have no interest in writing.” Connexions allows this faculty member to contribute his excellent FFT material and then weave a custom text for his course using contributions from other authors passionate about z-transforms. Since Connexions authors can contribute a high-quality, high-impact module withinhours or days, many more college faculty, industry professionals, K-12 teachers, and even talented students can write about what excites them and contribute modules to the commons. To date, Connexions’ development has been supported by approximately $8.5 million in funding from the Hewlett Foundation, the Maxfield Foundation, the NSF Partnerships for Innovation program, Rice University, and several friends of Rice. Connexions has received numerous awards, including the Tech Laureate Award from the Tech Museum of Innovation in 2006, the Internet Pioneer Award from the Berkman Center of Harvard University in 2008, and the World Technology Award for Education in 2009. 2.2 Interactive Online Learning Components The pedagogical effectiveness of interactive and exploratory elements such as Java applets, Adobe Flash, and LabVIEW Virtual Instruments (VIs) has been demonstrated in several studies [Phet,Phet2,Phet3]. NI’s LabVIEW is the tool of choice for SP education, since it is easy to program, has a rich graphical interface, directly supports signal processing, and can be embedded in a web page, including Connexions modules. LabVIEW’s graphical programming environment is natural for teaching signal processing since a program it much like sketching out a block diagram of the algorithm. Co-PIs Yoder and Padgett have used NI LabVIEW functionality to a great extent in their courses Introduction to SP and SP System Design [Yod]. They have used LabVIEW to generate many Lablets that appear on the companion web site for Discrete-Time SP [Opp]. Figure 2 is a web-delivered LabVIEW Lablet for convolution that also illustrates the effects of filter coefficient quantization on the pole-zero location of a filter. In the Lablet version the students see the poles and zeros change position as they change the number of bits per coefficient. The LabVIEW program can be done in minutes by someone familiar with both SP and LabVIEW. In contrast, Java applets for illustrating science and engineering concepts are notoriously

Figure 1: In Connexions, authors contribute their materials as XML modules to a common repository; materials can then be woven into myriad different customized collections, in which students can visualize the interconnections between concepts and disciplines. 

difficult to develop [Phet,Phet2]. In keeping with the Connexions spirit of open-access content and open-source software, NI has adopted a business model for the LabVIEW Player that is similar to that used by Adobe with its Acrobat PDF viewer, where any end user (a student or instructor, for example) can download a plug-in to make free use of the technology without purchasing the software necessary to run the simulations. 2.3 Signal Processing Question and Response System (SPQR) Learning engineering, science, and mathematics almost always involves problem solving for the numerous concepts being studied. Students generally work hundreds of problems while learning their core subjects in engineering and science. Some of these are assigned homework problems and test questions, but diligent students want to have access to a large database of problems beyond the assignments to practice on their own. The popularity of Schaum’s Outlines supports the idea that this learning strategy is common. Repetition is another essential ingredient for learning. Recent research claims that repeated testing provides better learning than extensive reading and studying [R1,R2]. Repetition of successfully answered questions is not beneficial, so algorithms are needed to control the serving of questions. Web-based systems offer an easy way to provide repetition that can be adapted to learners at all levels. Database driven web sites offer a golden opportunity to provide a learning environment that not only serves up many

practice problems for learning, but also adapts to the style and level of the learner. In order to enable this type of learning several components are needed: a large collection of problems, problems that are formatted for on-line interaction, tagged problems that can be related to concepts being learned, hints for problem solutions that can be accessed when the solution is difficult, ratings for the difficulty level, and links to background material that should be reviewed for problems on a particular concept. The user interface for the system should have all these capabilities. Concepts are the key to building a database of problems that can be used across many courses and many books in a given subject area. Different authors usually do not organize their presentation of the same material in the same order. Likewise, different teachers often choose their own path through the material written in books. Finally, each student eventually builds a personal concept map as a result of learning new material. When first learning a new subject, students tend to tie concepts to particular book chapters or certain time periods in a course, but this is unlikely to lead to robust knowledge of new concepts. A system, dubbed the signal processing question-response system (SPQR), makes the first foray into individualized tutoring via self assessment, or self-testing for short. SPQR has been deployed in an undergraduate SP class at GA-Tech with an enrollment

Figure 3: Metadata and linkage for one chapter via the index of the textbook SP‐First in the SPQR. 

Figure 2: Sample of NI LabView Virtual Instruments (VIs) delivered via the web. 

of 500 students each year. Over 1200 problems are already available in the SPQR database. These questions are tagged with metadata that captures the concept names for each problem. Then concept links from the problems to the textbook provide a quick way to look up relevant pages. The concept names were mostly derived from the index of the text, and then augmented with other terms. In effect, the index of the book is now live and ready when it is needed during problem solving; see Figure 3. Deriving metadata from a book's index is readily extensible, so more textbooks could be linked into the database even though the system would only have access to page numbers, not the actual material from these copyrighted works. Metadata for Connexions modules is embedded in an XML file, so linking to future material that will be authored by SPEN participants will be straightforward. The database of problems is the result of extensive archiving plus tagging each problem with metadata which enables searching and concept linking. For over 15 years, GA-Tech has archived all assigned problems and their solutions from quizzes and homeworks given in an introductory SP class. During part of this time, the on-line quizzing capability of WebCT was used to develop hundreds of questions outside of the traditional written homework and exam format. Recently, additional on-line questions have been produced for the SPQR system. The faculty and students in the SPEN will be empowered to contribute questions and discussion of solutions. In learning mathematics, research has documented that higher quality math questions come from math teachers, but higher quality solutions from amateurs who were not math teachers [Den,Alea]. Students can be become an important resource because most teachers know that having students engaged in explaining their solutions helps identify misconceptions and leads to correct understanding of concepts, i.e., to more robust learning. GA-Tech's implementation of the SPQR is based on an open-source MySQL database and the open-standard QTI markup format [QTI]. In software, QTI is implemented by the XML data binding language, allowing assessment material to be interchanged between repositories and learning management systems. 3. Project Execution 3.1 Lightweight Technology Framework The project partners bring a wealth of experience and curricular resources for teaching SP to the table from day one. In order to create the Textbook 2.0 for signal processing and foster a dynamic virtual education community around signal processing, the technical framework of the proposal will enhance linkages between the resources and between community members of the network of champions. We will develop in a spiral. First we will assess at the partners’ home institutions and apply the linkages described below. Then we will reach out to surrounding institutions, particularly those educating diverse student bodies, and finally disseminate to national scale using the IEEE-SPS organization. We describe each of these in Table 1 specifically highlighting what each partner will be doing.

Table 1: Summary of Execution Plan Activities. 

Implement Disseminate Assess

Textbook 2.0: • Publisher and open textbook and open

lesson content • Interactive simulations • Interactive learning and assessment

Virtual Education Community: Network of Champions for the SP Education Network (SPEN)

Evaluate teaching and learning resources, practices and activities baseline, formatively throughout, and summative

Community Site: Create community site for SPEN (discussions, to-do lists for modules and courses, statistics on usage, related lenses in Connexions). Create lenses in Connexions for SP materials and separate one for reviewed materials).

SPEN Campus Champions: Recruit champions using lightweight MOU that spells out commitments.

Baseline: Survey teachers and champions about current teaching and learning practices. Evaluate the baseline SPEN content reuse starting point: Size of the content, number of customizations adaptations and versions, online usage and location of use from location statistics, downloads of content, adoptions at the partner institutions and similar institutions.

SPQR • Upgrade existing concept lists to cover all

of undergraduate Signal Processing • Add links from the concepts to Connexions

modules and SP textbooks (already linked to SP First)

• Specify and communicate gaps and needs (more graphics, more interactive questions)

Pilot workshop and evaluation: Rice will host a pilot "train the trainer" workshop with partners and early adopter champions and use the community site to archive training, disseminate intermediate results, and provide ongoing communication.

Formative: Evaluate the workshop engagement and use of the community site. Identify and communicate emerging trends in the Network. (The assessment plan and activities are discussed fully in the “Assessment” section.)

LabVIEW LabLets • Identify gaps • Create Connexions modules to highlight

existing SP simulations that are already coordinated with the SP First book and that guide learners in effectively using the lablets.

• Link Lablets to Connexions content and SPQR concepts and content

Quality Review: IEEE SP Society: Review existing Connexions materials and adaptations and gap filling material created by the SPEN community. Add to Connexions lens.

Summative: Evaluation of content creation by the network: Connexions modules, collections, lenses, SPQR questions and solutions, LabVIEW SP simulations. Evaluation of content use and reuse, using both survey, web usage statistics through Google Analytics and Webalyzer, and reuse and adaptation statistics available on Connexions materials.

Connexions • Link modules to Lablets and SPQR • Create lenses for quality control and for

metadata and topic organization to be used by SPEN and IEEE. Lenses will use metadata from the SP concept maps that SPQR already has, and any extensions that come from the community of champions.

• Community create gap modules, collections tieing CNX, SPQR, Lablets, Publisher textbooks)

SPQR: Involve other schools and faculty and learners in authoring questions and using the tutoring system. Ongoing Workshops: Biannual regional workshops. Each of the partners will hold a regional workshop each year with the growing SPEN champions. Annual workshop of Champions network and the proposal partners.

3.1.1 Textbook 2.0 Between professionally published textbooks, community-authored lessons, textbooks, and courses, interactive LabVIEW simulations, SP concept maps, and the extensive database of problems and solutions, the partners on this proposal bring the ingredients for a super-connected, constantly-improving, easily-adaptable, rich and responsive learning environment for teaching and learning signal processing. At this point, the critical missing piece is the connective tissue and network to link between all of the resources. The following describes the linking activities that the partners will be starting and that the SPEN network will continue throughout the granting period. GA-Tech and SPQR: GA-Tech's Signal Processing Question Response System has worked extremely well in their courses for teaching SP. This collaborative project will extend it for use with concepts from the whole field of signal processing (including Random Signals), engage both faculty and students at other universities to use SPQR, engage the SPEN champions and the community to enrich the database, and link the questions with additional SP education resources (the RH LabVIEW Lablets, Connexions modules on SP). GA-Tech will take the lead in extending the problem database to include more graphical questions, especially ones that can be linked to the interactive Lablets. The SPEN champions will be enlisted to identify gaps in the learning resources so that new Connexions’ modules can be authored to explain how specific concepts help in solving certain classes of problems. Rice University and Connexions: Connexions will provide the authoring tools and repository for creating modules and course or textbook collections that SPEN partners and champions create to supplement the existing signal processing materials. The technology to support these is already created and available to the public. To foster the links and gateways between materials and to aid in discovering high quality, appropriate learning materials, Connexions lenses will be created.

Signal Processing Concept Lenses: Rice University will create Connexions lenses with signal processing concepts metadata developed at GA-Tech. With these SPEN lenses, partners and the community will identify signal processing modules and tag them with the appropriate signal processing concepts in the lens. New metadata can be added over time, making the entire process flexible and scalable. Readers can then use the concepts to find related resources.

Quality Control Lenses: Rice University, Connexions, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society will create an endorsement lenses to highlight reviewed and approved signal processing content. Rice and IEEE-SPS have already begun to review signal processing material in Connexions and will review SPEN created materials and endorse those that have passed their review, adding them to related Endorsement lenses to enhance discovery.

Rose-Hulman and LabVIEW Lablets: In order to foster connections between the Lablets, the SPQR system, publisher textbooks and open content in Connexions, RH will create additional Connexions modules that highlight the Lablets. Some of these modules should provide SP exercises that guide learners through effective usage of the Lablets. The SPEN Champions and community will be trained to continue the process and encouraged to author new explanatory modules. The Signal Processing Concept Lenses will be used to appropriately tag the Lablet modules. 3.1.2 Virtual Education Community Site for the Signal Processing Education Network In order to foster communication between partners, SPEN champions, and the engineering community, Rice will create a community site for SPEN. Since the goal of the project is to increase linkage between resources and people, the site will enhance communication with discussion groups, mailing lists, and to-do lists. Additionally, it serve as an information-hive illustrating the ongoing activities and needs of the community. Off-the-shelf tools will be used for the community site as much as possible. Rice University has included a small amount of programming funds to integrate “activity feeds” from Connexions to highlight new activity and motivate contributions. Connexions lens activity is available through feeds showing what content has been added and how it has been tagged. These feeds can also be used to show material that is currently under review in review lenses and then what material has been endorsed in endorsement lenses. Connexions statistics on usage will also be integrated to show the impact to material SPEN members contribute. 3.2 Network Development Approach Promising educational projects and transformative ideas often fail because scaling innovations from classroom to campus to regional to national to global is both hard and not generally part of the individual instructor's mission and metrics for success. Open access online material has the potential to transform and accelerate scaling and disseminating successful ideas, However, it is important to recognize that not only is education and training a “contact sport”, but scaling change is still largely a “contact sport”, relying serendipitous promulgation at a small number of community oriented conferences and workshops. It is clear that not only is adoption of new instructional ideas hard and time consuming, scaling outside your own classroom is almost insurmountable for an individual. To address this we propose to borrow a very successful concept deployed by the NSF TeraGrid called the TeraGrid Campus Champions program. The program was created to help researchers on campuses across the US to be more successful with accessing and using national TeraGrid resources (hosted at a few resource sites across the US). By creating a national network of champions, users benefit from access to local expertise that is part of a national network, and the project by having access to a vibrant community of campus champions that meet regularly and provide feedback on barriers to access. We have further evidence that such an approach can work from preliminary evidence from an experiment with a pilot textbook for teaching statistics. A statistics textbook used in California was purchased and made available in Connexions in the fall of 2008. Simultaneously a "network of champions", the community college consortium for OER (CCCOER), formed and rapidly expanded to over 100 members. The consortium spread the word about the textbook, how to use and adapt it in Connexions, and connected specific faculty using the textbook. A time-lapse view of embedded Google Analytics in the book on Connexions shows use of both the individual modules and the book as a whole spreading across the United States from California to New York, and internationally. In addition to the automated statistics, the consortium tracks use and reuse in “Collaborative Statistics Adoption and Usage” at http://cnx.org/content/m18261/latest/, and has recorded 50 known adoptions and 5 full book adaptations shared on Connexions.

At its core the SPEN will implement a Campus Champions program adapted from the TeraGrid Campus Champions program. The Campus Champions program is a critical component of moving innovations in education from the experimental setting implemented by the research team to a much larger number of institutions across the US as well as outside the US. The key objectives of this education network are to:

• Provide campus representatives (Campus Champions) with the required knowledge to deploy, use, adopt and support engineering educators looking to introduce active online education and learning material to advance engineering education; Host regional hands-on workshops and train-the-trainer sessions on the tools and resources integrated by the SPEN project;

• Provide campus representatives with mentoring contacts to help educators overcome barriers or problems that preclude productive educational use and integration;

• Raise awareness among campus educators to foster increased and effective use of open educational resources and services to advance engineering education; Help increase the base of educators to adopt active open educational resources on the campus.

• Serve as a community of experts advising on needs, gaps, and accelerated use, re-use and re-purposing of online educational resources; Evaluate the effectiveness and suggest improvements for how SPEN can better serve and support these stated objectives.

• Empower Campus Champions to convey needs, requirements, successes and barriers seen by campus educators across the community and provide critical feedback for further improvements;

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) will be developed that each campus champion's institution will sign. While in general most campus champion are likely to be SP faculty members and/or instructors we also invite postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students to be part of this network and we will ask that the MOU also be co-signed by a Dean and/or Provost. This high level signature will provide a vehicle for support for the faculty member/instructor as well as raise the awareness of the educational network. Pilot workshop and evaluation: Rice university will host a pilot “train the trainer” workshop with all the proposal partners and the early adopter champions.The pilot workshop will introduce the participants to all the available resources, conduct train-the-trainer sessions on effective use of the resources, and on creating new resources, begin the process of determining gaps in the content, and assess any existing barriers to use, adaptation, and creation of new resources. The assessment team (ISKME) will engage workshop participants in formative evaluation of the project baseline (discussed in the asssement plan.) Ongoing Workshops: Biannual regional workshops and annual Champions network workshops. Based on the pilot workshop, workshop activities will be tuned and streamlined. Worshops will focus on teaching practices, use of the SPEN resources, adaptation and review of resources, creation of new resources, use of the community site and development of network contacts and mentors. Each of the partners will hold a regional workshop each year with SPEN champions in their region. An annual workshop will unite the Champions network as a whole. 3.4 Timeline and Milestones The project is organized as a three-year research and implementation project focused around the following set of tasks and milestones. During the annual review meeting the list will be revised based on formal and informal feedback, technological and community progress, and results to date. Year 1:

• Select material from Connexions and SP First for enhancement with LabView VIs and SPQR. Enhance concept maps to cover all of SP. Select a subset of resources that will be piloted and ready for pilot workshop.

• Develop community web page and the SPEN Campus Champion Memorandum of Understanding • Recruit 6-10 campus champions’ institutions; Community goal: 50 active members • Organize pilot train-the-trainer workshop during Q4 of project year • Survey SP community and workshop participants to provide baseline assessment and formative

data Year 2:

• Continue enhancing Connexions and SP First material with LabView VIs and SPQR • Recruit 10-15 additional campus champions’ institutions; Community goal: 300 active members • Organize multiple regional train-the-trainer workshops and annual workshop. • On-going assessment and formative data reports (see assessment section for details.)

Year 3: • Continue enhancing Connexions and SP First material with LabView VIs and SPQR • Recruit 10-15 additional campus champions’ institutions; Community: 1000 active members • Organize multiple regional train-the-trainer workshops and final annual workshop • On-going assessment and report on impacts • Disseminate lessons learned widely via conferences, publications, and the project website

4. Evaluation and Assessment The project’s evaluation will be conducted in partnership with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). ISKME is an independent nonprofit research organization that conducts research in data use, knowledge collaboration, and social learning in the education sector. ISKME’s mission is to help educational institutions and the organizations and systems that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success, through research, evaluation, and practice. For this project, ISKME will formatively and summatively evaluate the project’s efforts to facilitate and support a network of teachers, students and practitioners who interactively explore dynamic Signal Processing (SP) content as they work to model real world science and engineering behaviors through collaborative, inquiry-based teaching and learning practices. ISKME aims to inform the project by examining how teachers and learners use, adapt, create, and evaluate the SP resources and draw upon other network members in the process, as well as by assessing the project’s impact on teaching, learning and its implications for scaling the SP Education Network model to other contexts, subjects and disciplines. Specifically, ISKME’s research will assess the following:

1. How the project’s Signal Processing content is created, shared, reused and evaluated by teachers, students, and other network community members—specifically toward diversification of content to meet the needs of minority learners.

2. The extent to which the project’s Signal Processing content is adopted, used, and reused by teachers, students and others who are not part of the project’s target community.

3. The extent to which new teaching and learning practices are inspired and implemented as a result of participation in the Signal Processing Education Network.

4. Examining what teachers perceive as the impact of the SPEN (and associated content, tools and processes on the role of teachers and learners, and on teaching and learning practices generally).

5. The successes and challenges of engaging in the Signal Processing Education Network, and the supports that best facilitate engagement by participants.

6. The role(s) that experts/champions take on in engaging teachers in the Signal Processing Education Network, and how that role informs models for engaging teachers in collaborative networks more generally.

7. How the project’s education network model benefits engineering as a discipline, and how it might be scaled to other subjects and disciplines.

By answering these questions the research seeks to shed light on how the SPEN model is aligned to new teaching and learning practices for participating faculty and students. The research also seeks to inform the relationship between the model and engineering as a discipline—namely, how the SPEN model contributes to the engineering discipline, and at the same time, what engineering as a discipline contributes to the model. Finally, the research seeks to provide insights into the ways that knowledge sharing occurs, the types of knowledge shared, and the role of knowledge sharing in enhancing teaching and learning practices.

ISKME’s prior applied research will inform this study, in terms of assessing and implementing new models for information sharing—including those centered on the exchange of open educational resources, and the development of processes that facilitate community engagement with those resources. ISKME will also draw on its expertise in examining collaborative technologies to support teacher and student knowledge sharing about pedagogy and curriculum materials, which have shown benefits in terms of increased efficiencies in curriculum design and classroom preparation, improved curriculum materials, and more participatory teaching structures that facilitate teacher-to-teacher, student-to-teacher and student-to-student engagement. 4.1 Workplan and Timeline ISKME will work collaboratively with project leaders to conduct the research. Data collection activities will include:

• Preliminary research: Interviews with project leaders and review of project documents, tools, and SP content to gain context for the research and to inform the logistics and development of a detailed research plan.

• Baseline survey of faculty to assess extant teaching practices and perceptions, including curriculum use and curriculum development needs (both digital and non-digital content), existing teaching practices, teacher collaboration and networks, and technology use/comfort level.

• Baseline analysis of existing SP content to assess amount of content in place, level of use, ways it has been adapted, number of users, and amount and types of community engagement around the content.

• Survey of faculty in year 2 and 3 of the project to assess engagement with SP content (creation, reuse and evaluation practices), changes in teaching and learning perceptions and practices, instances of the model's implementation in the classroom, and challenges and successes to the model's implementation.

• Survey of students in year 2 and 3 of the project to assess engagement with SP content and changes in learning practices resulting from their engagement.

• Collection of grades and enrollment and retention data (historic and end of each semester) for students of participating faculty to provide indications of the impact of the project on student learning, achievement, and persistence.

• Workshop observations to collect observational data on faculty responses to the SPEN model, on perceived challenges and benefits of using and implementing the model, and on the role of champions in sharing and supporting faculty adoption of the model

• Analysis of artifacts on the SPEN and DSP community sites, including discussion threads, postings, and interactions, to assess project progress, impacts, and engagement by partners and network community participants.

• Use analysis of activity on Connexions, LabVIEW, and SPQR through Google Analytics and Webalizer to understand access and behavior patterns on the sites. Use analysis of activity on Connexions through Connexions’ statistics to assess amount and ways content is created, modified, reused and evaluated, and amount and types of communities engaged in the content.

The timeline for the outline research activities and associated evaluation are shown in Table 2. Table 2: The timeline for the above research activities and associated evaluation.

Research Tasks Research Sub tasks Associated Goals Timing

Preliminary Research

Review project documents technology, tools, content Gain context for the research and inform creation of detailed evaluation plan

Oct.-Nov. 2010 Interviews with project leaders

Research Instrument Design

Baseline teacher survey protocol Collaboratively design research instruments with project leaders

Nov. 2010

Faculty and student survey protocol Feb. 2012 Yr 2 survey; May 2013 Yr 3 survey

Use analysis framework July 2011

Artifact analysis framework July 2011

Data Collection

Baseline teacher survey Assess current curriculum behaviors, teaching practices/needs

Jan. 2011

Faculty and student survey data Assess impact on teaching and learning and supports going forward

Oct. 2012; July 2013

Web analytics data Assess access and behavior patterns on the project’s associated sites

Ongoing- June. 2013

Connexions statistics

Assess amount and ways content is created, reused and evaluated, and amount and types of users and communities engaged in the content

Ongoing – June. 2013

Community site artifact data

Collect data on interactions, discussion threads, and postings to assess project progress and engagement

Ongoing- June 2013

Student grades, enrollment and retention data Assess impact on student learning, achievement and persistence

Ongoing-July 2013

Data Analysis

Analysis of resource creation, use and modifications within and outside the Network; analysis of collaborative activities, interactions on the project’s sites

Map the flow of SP resources and knowledge within, across and outside of the Network

Ongoing-July 2013

Analysis of baseline and emergent teaching and learning practices

Identify and define emergent collaborative teaching and learning practices resulting from the project

Ongoing – July 2013

Analysis of SP content use behaviors

Identify a framework that outlines and supports use, reuse, and creation of SP content that can be adapted for future contexts and populations

Ongoing – July 2013

Dissemination of Findings

Quarterly blog postings on SPEN and DSP sites

Provide formative feedback/findings

Quarterly

Presentations at project conferences and workshops Ongoing Presentation at external conferences Years 2 and 3

Interim report July 2012

Final report Provide summative feedback/findings Sept. 2013

Throughout the grant period, ISKME will disseminate findings with project partners and participants to inform the ongoing development of the project. Specific dissemination activities include posting quarterly research summaries in the form of an internal research blog for the SPEN community summarizing the research goals, methods, progress and findings and external research blog posts contributed to the DSP Community Page to share emergent findings with project participants and engage users in continuous feedback loop around findings. ISKME will also present its evaluation findings at the project’s conferences and workshops, annually. Interim and final reports of the evaluation findings will be written for project partners and the National Science Foundation. The reports will offer a framework to support scalability and implementation of the project’s model in future contexts by mapping the flow of resources within and beyond the community and mechanisms to support enhanced resource sharing, by indentifying collaborative teaching and learning practices that result from the project and ways to further support those practices, and by assessing use, reuse, adaptation and creation practices of SP content and ways to support those behaviors going forward. In addition to these reports, a version of the findings and recommendations will be disseminated nationally through at least one academic publication and also via web-based media. 5. Dissemination We shall use several complementary vehicles to actively disseminate the findings from our project. The primary component will be the Signal Processing Education Network of Campus Champions. We conservatively estimate that this network will include at least 20-25 institutions across the US that will engage in adopting, deploying, developing, and enhancing the educational material made available

through this effort. The network will, in addition to hosting semi-monthly teleconferences and a project web page, host 8-12 regional hands-on workshops focused on training and mentoring instructors and educators on how best to adopt and use the open online active content developed by the project team. These workshops will build on the success of the Connexions Conferences, held in 2008, 2009, and 2010. A key component of the workshops will aim to “train-the-trainer,” focusing on how to continually improve and diversify our material to better support a diverse set of needs and institutions across the nation. In selecting venues for these workshops, we will be sensitive to geographic coverage as well as the cost of participation. A significant part of the funding requested will be used to help lower the cost of these hands-on workshops. To further extend the reach and lower the cost of participation, workshops will also be hosted in conjunction with national and international conferences and workshops such as ICCASP, ICIP, SP-Education, and ASEE, to name a few. Piggybacking on these popular events will also allow the team to recruit new members to the Campus Champion’s program, as well as reach beyond our national borders and the disciplinary limits of signal processing. Locally, each campus involved in this project will not only be adopting and using the SP active content, but will review how the findings from the specific domain of SP can be adopted to other engineering and science domains. At Rice, this will be take place in a close collaboration with the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL). Funded through the benefaction of Ann and John Doerr, RCEL fosters creative interdisciplinary activities throughout Rice's School of Engineering that challenge students to think beyond disciplinary boundaries through leadership, design, entrepreneurship, and service. During the coming summer RCEL plans to fund several undergraduate interns to work on extentions to the Connexions platform, and sees the development of enhanced cognitive tutor technologies as an important target for interdisciplinary student research going forward. Rice students in the Mathematical Sciences already author Connexions to disseminate the results of the research they conduct through the NSF-Funded VIGRE; co-PI Embree (present director of RCEL) has served as a mentor for several of these projects. Connexions has the potential to be a centerpiece for RCEL-related actitivies going forward. We will also use more traditional methods, such as presenting at national and international conferences, as well as publishing articles in magazines such as the IEEE SP Magazine, IEEE Spectrum, and ASEE Prism, to name a few. Finally, all the material and findings will be published on the Network webpage, linking to the open (free) educational materials as well as maintaining pointers, metadata, and linkage to traditional commercial texts such as SP First and DSP First.

6. Expanded Management and Coordination Plan 6.1 Project Team Connexions content repository (Baraniuk, Burrus, Johnson, Vardi, Embree et al. at Rice): Rice University serves as the administrative headquarters of the project. PIs Baraniuk, Burrus, and Johnson are SP experts and regular Connexions authors. The Rice team is rounded out by co-PI Vardi, an expert in database systems (relevant to the SPQR) and will participate actively in several aspect of this project, ranging from contributing his research expertise in databases and information integration to leveraging extensive knowledge he has with starting and operating an online open research journal, and co-PI Embree, director of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL), formed last year by John and Ann Doerr, which is using Connexions to bring real-world problems and challenges into the Rice Engineering curriculum and to disseminate its lessons learned worldwide. Senior investigator (SI) Odegard will help supervise the creation of the campus champion program. SI Fletcher will serve as the Connexions technology integration advisor. SI Dholakia is marketing expert on community-driven enterprises and has studied communities as diverse as Harley Davidson Owners Groups and Connexions authors [Dh1,Dh2]. All Rice team members have extensive experience with organizing and running local, regional and national workshops as well as running numerous hands-on training events. Signal Processing Interactive Learning Objects (Yoder and Padgett et al. at RH): The Rose-Hulman PIs bring web delivered interactivity to the project. Both are experts in SP education, and have authored

books in SP. Both collaborated on numerous Lablets that now appear on a companion web site for a major DSP textbook. Both teach courses at Rose-Hulman in the area of SP. Both have experience in developing and delivering hands-on workshops for faculty. Both have extensive networks in the SP education community and have both served as chair of the IEEE SPS SP Education Technical Committee. Signal Processing Question and Response System (McClellan, Romberg et al. at GA-Tech): Integration of the SPQR with Connexions will be provided by the GA-Tech principal investigators, both of whom are experts in SP. Two PhD students will be involved, one of whom has been a co-developer of the SPQR system. PI McClellan is the originator and co-developer of the SPQR which is a natural outgrowth of his activities in teaching SP early in the undergraduate curriculum. He is also the author of numerous Lablets and other interactive demos for learning, and has a history of productive collaboration with the RH PIs. McClellan is the head of the Center for Signal and Image Processing (CSIP) at GA-Tech which includes 13 other SP professors involved in research and teaching in all areas of SP at the undergraduate and graduate level. Co-PI Romberg will provide SP expertise in the area of random signals, computational harmonic analysis, applied linear algebra, and linear inverse problems. He teaches courses at GA-Tech in each of these areas at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Romberg has authored numerous Connexions modules and has collaborated with the Rice PIs. He is actively developing a Connexions mini-course on linear inverse problems in SP. Both team members have experience with running hands-on workshops and summer training programs. Content Adoption and Broader Impact (von Borries, Nava et al. at UTEP): PI von Borries coordinated the first team of students translating Connexions modules on signals and systems from English to Spanish. This initiative indicated that free educational material in Spanish has a large audience not only among minority Hispanic engineering students in the U.S., but also in other teaching and learning communities in the Americas. The Connexions Project enabled PI von Borries to establish collaborations with Rice PIs Baraniuk and Burrus, and instructors in South America, including Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Co-PI Nava is a strong supporter of using Connexions in our program because of the: 1) low-cost high-quality learning material addressing the needs of our low-income Hispanic student population; 2) interactive nature of the proposed tools, which will, potentially, increase effective learning; 3) assessment tools which provide continuous evaluation of students' comprehension which will, therefore, provide the opportunity to focus subsequent teaching efforts on areas of student need; and 4) customization of material to individual needs of students entering the ECE department at UTEP, frequently characterized by diverse levels of preparedness. Evaluation and Assessment (Petrides, Jimes et al. at ISKME): The project’s evaluation will be conducted in partnership with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). ISKME is an independent nonprofit research organization that conducts research in data use, knowledge collaboration, and social learning in the education sector. Lisa Petrides, PI, and Cynthia Jimes, Senior Personnel, will draw on their prior applied research experience to inform this study, in terms of assessing and implementing new models for knowledge sharing—including those centered on the exchange of open educational resources (OER), and the development of processes that facilitate community engagement with those resources. Petrides and Jimes published ISKME’s extensive, mixed method study on author use and reuse of Connexions materials [Pet]. Petrides and Jimes will also draw on their expertise in examining collaborative technologies to support teacher and student knowledge sharing about pedagogy and curriculum materials, which have shown benefits in terms of increased efficiencies in curriculum design and classroom preparation, improved curriculum materials, and more participatory teaching structures that facilitate teacher-to-teacher, student-to-teacher and student-to-student engagement. Examples of current research projects within this realm led by Petrides and Jimes include a grant from The Shuttleworth Foundation to examine OER teacher communities in South Africa (in partnership with Siyavula and Connexions); a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to assess uptake, adoption, and use of community college open textbooks, and the implications of using open textbooks on teaching and learning; and a grant from the Ford Foundation to examine the role that

teacher communities play in engaging teachers in art and social justice OER, and the impact of OER use on teaching art as a subject. 6.2 Project Coordination This project consists of two components: (1) fusing three independently tested technologies used in education and learning into one educational framework for delivering active learning material and (2) the formation of a Signal Processing Education Network that will serve as a national resource for SP educators and learners offering access to expertise and advice on how to modify and adjust content accelerating adoption of active online content and learning objects into classrooms. To illustrate how communities form and grow it is useful to consider a three-stage model: Stage 1: This is the early stage of a community, where it consists mostly of self-interested individuals, who really do not think of themselves as a group or community, but rather seek to achieve their individual goals. In this stage authors participate by limited sharing putting content online and slowly gaining exposure to the marketplace; instructors participate ad hoc by discovering and gaining access to free and high-quality content; and students because they have to, or because they find the materials useful. Stage 2: In this intermediate stage, participants feel some affinity to the community and are willing to help other members, but only if it is not too inconvenient or effortful. Instructors may answer some questions of students, authors may be willing to get feedback from instructors or students to improve the material being shared, but none of the participants are willing to spend too much time and effort interacting with other community members.

Stage 3: In this ultimate stage of community development, participants have a genuine interest in the well being of other members, and are willing to invest significant amounts of time and effort to help others and derive value from the community. Participants share their goals and values and a sense of belonging to the community. The SP community is clearly ripe for moving into stage three and a key part of this project is not only support this but to accelerate moving participants from stage one to stage three by providing access to experts and members in a coordinated and scalable way. An organization chart for the management of the project is provided in Figure 5. The overall project will be managed by the Rice PI Baraniuk. Rice will hire a full time executive director for the project that

will be in charge of day-to-day operation and oversight. A key responsibility of the executive director, in addition to ensuring continued coordination of the project and progress towards the technology objectives and deliverables, will be to serve as the lead for the education network campus champion’s component of the project. This includes recruiting new campus champions, hosting semi-monthly teleconferences and online training sessions with the champions’ network, maintain the project web portal, and serve as the main conduit between the champion’s network and the technology integration teams.

Figure 5: Project organization chart

The Executive Director will also be an ex officio member the project steering committee consisting of the lead PI from each of the five project institutions (Baraniuk, McClellan, Yoder, von Borries and Petrides). This group, coordinated by the project lead will meet via teleconferences monthly to review progress and set near term goals for the Signal Processing Education Network project and provide operational input and near term feedback to the executive director. The project steering committee will prepare and present project status and findings to an advisory council during quarterly teleconferences. The advisory council will provide periodic ongoing criticism and feedback as well as support building the network by helping promote the project. In addition to teleconferences there will be an annual face to face project meeting, hosted in conjunction with one of the planned network workshops. This face to face meeting will be used to perform a more in-depth review, evaluate progress and set priorities and directions for the coming year. The advisory council will be invited and are encouraged to participate in the annual meeting. The following engineering and educational leaders have agreed to serve on the advisory council: John Seeley Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox; Gene Frantz, Senior Texas Instruments Fellow; James Truchard, President and CEO of NI; Ron Schafer, Hewlett Packard Fellow; Marcia Horton, VP, Editorial Director, Pearson Education; Mos Kaveh, Centenial Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota and President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. A significant benefit of this university/industrial partnership is the commercial experience and vision that companies like NI, TI, and HP provide in areas such as marketing, sustainability, and commercial issues. For example, As the Connexions project has matured, NI sees several potential commercial solutions that can leverage Connexions’ technology. Efforts on both the commercial and academic side of NI’s business will explore the commercial viability for Connexions. For example, on the academic side of the business a new publishing initiative being launched through the efforts of Tom Robbins, previously DSP editor for Prentice-Hall, plans to utilize Connexions as a content repository for upcoming works. The vision is to begin publishing works in Connexions as soon as they reach draft phase, allowing the power of the community to review and improve upon the work. Final products would have all multimedia and supplementary content on Connexions and would provide educators around the world with a low-cost alternative to textbooks without the need to introduce separate international editions. This model also provides a quicker time to market for translations and derivative works. Research into additional possible commercial ventures or partnerships with Connexions will explore licensing, subscription access, and NI owned and controlled portions of the site to use in “for-profit” enterprises. The result of this research is truly a win-win for both parties; NI continues to better understand how its products need to meet the demands of engineering educators and Connexions gains a full understanding of how its services must evolve to meet the demands of both educators and commercial ventures as well. Finally, we note that open-access development is not incompatible with commercial publishing. Indeed, high-quality but very low-cost Connexions books are already printed on demand by Qoop for several courses at Rice University. In a joint venture with Cambridge University Press, former IEEE SPS President and University of Michigan Professor Alfred Hero’s new book on statistical signal processing will be simultaneously published as a traditional CUP book and made available freely in the Connexions commons. RUP and citation to it [Buc]. We expect a vibrant community-of-use to emerge around this material, helping it evolve and grow with time.

References NSF Proposal for Program Solicitation 10-532

Collaborative Research: CI-Team Implementation Project: The Signal Processing Education Network

[Aca] America COMPETES Act, 25 April 2007, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-

bin/bdquery/z?d110:SN00761:@@@D&summ2=m&. [Alea] T. Aleahmad, V. Aleven, R. Kraut, "Creating a Corpus of Targeted Learning Resources with a

Web-based Open Authoring Tool," http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~taleahma/papers/ieee-tlt-personalization-preprint.pdf.

[Alev] V. Aleven and K. Koedinger, “An effective metacognitive strategy: Learning by doing and explaining with a computer-based cognitive tutor,” Cognitive Science, vol. 26, no. 2, 2002.

[App] S. Appadwedula, R. G. Baraniuk, M. Berry, M. Butala, H. Choi, M. Haun, D. L. Jones, M. Kramer, D. Moussa, L. Potter, D. Sachs, B. Wade, R. Wagner, “Open Content Signal Processing Laboratories in Connexions,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing – ICASSP'03, Hong Kong, April 2003.

[Bar1] R. G. Baraniuk, C. S. Burrus, D. H. Johnson, D. L. Jones, “Connexions – Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities in Signal Processing,'' IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 10-16, September 2004.

[Bar2] R. G. Baraniuk, C. S. Burrus, B. Hendricks, G. Henry, A. Hero, D. H. Johnson, D. L. Jones, R. Nowak, J. Odegard, L. Potter, R. Reedstrom, P. Schniter, I. Selesnick, D. Williams, W. Wilson, “Connexions: Education for a Networked World,” in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing – ICASSP '02, Orlando, May 2002.

[Blu] R. Blumenthal, "College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age," New York Times, 14 May 2005.

[Bo1] Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 1998. [Bu1] C. S. Burrus, Digital Signal Processing and Digital Filter Design, in Connexions,

http://cnx.org/content/col10598/latest/. [Bu2] C. S. Burrus, Fast Fourier Transforms, in Connexions, http://cnx.org/content/col10550/latest/. [Bu3] C. S. Burrus, J. H. McClellan, A. V. Oppenheim, T. W. Parks, R. W. Schafer and H. W.

Schüssler, Computer-Based Exercises for Signal Processing Using Matlab, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ (1994), Second edition (1998).

[Buc] R. Buckman, "Rice University Revives Its Press In Digital Model," Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2006.

[CC] Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. [Chi] M. Chi, M. Bassok, M. Lewis, P. Reimann, R. Glaser, “Self-explanations: How students study

and use examples in learning to solve problems,” Cognitive Science, vol. 13, pp. 145-182, 1989. [Cla] R. Clark, R. Mayer, E-learning and the Science of Instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. [Coh] N. Cohen, "Don't Buy That Textbook, Download It Free," New York Times, 14 September 2008. [Den] P. Denny, A. Luxton-Reilly, J. Hamer, "The PeerWise System of Student Contributed

Assessment Questions," in Proc. Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference, Vol. 78, 2008.

[Dh1] U. M. Dholakia, J. King, R. G. Baraniuk, "What Makes an Open Education Program Sustainable? The Case of Connexions," OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) Closed Workshop Report, 2006.

[Dh2] U. P. Dholakia, R. G. Baraniuk, “The Roles of Social Networks and Communities in Open Education Programs,” in Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, S. Hatzipanagos and S. Warburton, eds., IGI Global Publishing, 2008.

[Do1] E. Doering, Communication Systems Projects with LabVIEW , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10610/latest/.

[Do2] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Additive Synthesis , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10479/latest/.

[Do3] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Analog Synthesis and Modular Synthesizers , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10480/latest/.

[Do4] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Introduction to Audio and Musical Signals , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10481/latest/.

[Do5] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- MIDI for Synthesis and Algorithm Control , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10487/latest/.

[Do6] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Modulation Synthesis , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10483/latest/.

[Do7] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Programming Techniques for Audio Signal Processing , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10440/latest/.

[Do8] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Sound Spatialization and Reverberation, in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10485/latest/.

[Do9] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Subtractive Synthesis , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10484/latest/.

[Do10] E. Doering, Musical Signal Processing with LabVIEW -- Tremolo and Vibrato Effects (Low-Frequency Modulation) , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10482/latest/.

[Do11] E. Doering, SubVI Specifications for "Communication Systems Projects with LabVIEW" , in Connexions. http://cnx.org/content/col10608/latest/.

[Don1] M. Donovan, J. Bransford, “How students learn: Science in the classroom,” Committee on How People Learn, National Research Council, Tech. Rep., 2005.

[Don2] M. Donovan, J. Bransford, J. Pellegrino, “How people learn: Bridging research and practice,” Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice, National Research Council, Tech. Rep., 1999.

[Dun] T. H. Dunning, "Hearing on: "The State of Research Infrastructre at U.S. Universities," Subcommittee on research and Science Education, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, 23 February 2010, http://www.casc.org/papers/THDJr_CongressionalTestimony_Feb10.pdf.

[Edi] Editorial, "That Book Costs How Much?," New York Times, 25 April 2008. [Edi2] Editorial, "Help, by the Book," New York Times, 1 May 2007. [Edu] EDUCAUSE, "Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to national

Facilities: Challenges and Strategies, EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group and Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, February 2009, http://www.casc.org/papers/EPO0906.pdf.

[Henr] G. Henry, R. G. Baraniuk, C. Kelty, “The Connexions Project: Promoting Open Sharing of Knowledge for Education,” Syllabus, July 2003.

[Holl] G. Holland, "Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks in California," Los Angeles Times, 18 August 2008.

[I1] The Infinity Project, www.infinity-project.org. [Jo1] D. H. Johson, Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I, in Connexions,

http://cnx.org/content/col10040/latest/. [Kel] C. Kelty, “Free Science/Free Software,” First Monday, vol. 6, no. 12, Dec. 2001. [Lens] Lens for Engineering, http://cnx.org/lenses/NSFBurrus/engineering-content/. [Les1] L. Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin, 2005. [Les2] L. Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Random House,

2001. [Les3] L. Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2000. [Mc2] J. McClellan, R. Schafer, M. Yoder, DSP First: A Multimedia Approach. Prentice-Hall, Inc.,

1998.

[Mc4] J. McClellan, R. Schafer, M. Yoder, Signal Processing First, Prentice Hall, http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0130909998,00%2ben-USS_01DBC.html, http://yoder-3.institute.rose-hulman.edu/visible3/contents/index.htm.

[Mitc] W. Mitchell, A. Inouye, M. Blumenthal, “Beyond productivity: Information technology, innovation, and creativity,” National Research Council Report, Tech. Rep., 2003.

[N1] Debasish Dutta, "Lifelong Learning Imperative in Engineering: Summary of a Workshop," http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12866.

[NAE] National Academy of Engineering, "Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century," http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11338.

[NRC01] National Research Council, "Knowing and learning mathematics for teaching: Proceedings of a workshop mathematics teacher preparation content workshop program steering committee," Center for Education. Washington, D.C.: Tech. Rep., 2001.

[Opp] A. Oppenheim, R. Schafer, Discrete-Time Signal Processing 3rd Edition. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2010, http://yoder-3.institute.rose-hulman.edu/dtsp/contents/index.htm.

[Ors] G. C. Orsak, S. L. Wood, S. C. Douglas, D. C. Munson, J. R. Treichler, R. A. Athale, M. W. Yoder, M. A. Yoder, Engineering Our Digital Future: The Infinity Project. Prentice Hall, 2003.

[Pet] L. Petrides, L. Nguyen, C. Jimes, A. Karaglani, “Open educational resources: Inquiring into author use and reuse,” International Journal of Technology Enhanced Education, Vol. 1, No. 1-2, pp. 98-117, 2008.

[Phet] W. Adams, K. Perkins, N. Finkelstein, S. Reid, M. Dubson, N. Podolefsky, C. Wieman, R. LeMaster, "Research-Based Design Features of Web-based Simulations," http://phet.colorado.edu/phet-dist/publications/Simulation%20Design%20AAPT%2004.pdf.

[Phet2] C. E. Weimann, W. K. Adams, K. K. Perkins, "PhET: Simulations That Enhance Learning", Science, Vol. 332, 31 October 2008, pp. 682-683.

[Phet3] C. E. Weimann, K. K. Perkins, W. K. Adams, "Oersted Medal Lecture 2007: Interactive simulations for teaching physics: What works, what doesn't, and why," American Journal of Physics, Vol. 76, No. 4 & 5, April/May 2008, pp. 393-399.

[QTI] IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification, http://www.imsglobal.org/question/. [R1] J. D. Karpicke, H. L. Roedinger, "Is expanding retrieval a superior method for learning text

materials?," Memory & Cognition, vol. 38, no.1, pp.116-124, 2010. [R2] J. D. Karpicke, H. L. Roediger, "The critical importance of retrieval for learning," Science, 319,

pp. 966-968, 2008. [Ra1] Race to the Top, Department of Education, http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-

assessment/applicant.html [Ra] L. Rawlinson, "Throw Away your School Books: Here Comes Textbook 2.0," CNN.com, 8

November 2007. [Rh] Rhaptos, http://rhaptos.org/. [Sel] J. Selingo, “Connecting the Dots,” ASEE Prism, vol. 13, no. 4, Dec. 2003, pp 34-37. [Ste] C. A. Stewart "Testimony from the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing before the

United States House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology Hearing on Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World," http://www.casc.org/papers/Stewart_Testimony.pdf

[St1] U.S. PIRG, "New Report Shows College Textbook Costs Increasing Sharply Ahead of Inflation: Publishers Engage in Practices that Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs for Students", http://www.uspirg.org/newsroom/consumer-protection/consumer-protection-news/new-report-shows-college-textbook-costs-increasing-sharply-ahead-of-inflation-publishers-engage-in-practices-that-needlessly-drive-up-textbook-costs-for-students.

[Wak] D. Wakin, "How to Learn Something for Nothing," New York Times, 18 April 2010. [Wak2] D. Wakin, "Education Life: The Music Lesson," New York Times, 18 April 2010. [XML] XML, www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.

[Yod] M. A. Yoder, J. H. McClellan, R. W. Schafer, “Using Multimedia and the Web to Teach the Theory of Digital Multimedia Signals,” Frontiers in Education (FIE) ‘95, Atlanta, GA, vol. 2, pp. 14– 18, 1–4 Nov. 1995.