Conference to discuss declining enrollments

Next week, July 25-28 in San Jose, CA, the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC) is putting on their SAME-TEC conference. SAME-TEC means Semiconductor, Automated Manufacturing, Electronics, Traning and Education Conference. It has been going on for three years and even before that as a conference devoted to semiconductor manufacturing. Today the emphasis is broader convering manufacturing and more generic electronic education at the community college level. Already over 200 community college faculty and administrators have signed up and that figure is up over last year. So while there is a general decline in enrollments, interest in this conference is growing.

One of the key sessions this year is one addressing the declining enrollment problem many schools have been experiencing. The session will feature an audience polling system to get real-time input from the faculty present. Accompanying this session is a panel discussion with representatives from industry, book publishing, and academia. I am on that panel as well. We hope this session will better clarify the depth of the problem and begin to identify solutions.

It is still not too late to sign up for this terrific conference. The first day features a workshop on the Work-Ready Electronics project, an NSF funded development program to create online modules to update electronic courses and curricula. The major topic is how to teach DSP at the technician level and a look at what is being done to teach at the systems level rather than the old style component level. It should be interesting. For more information on this conference, go to www.matec.org and look under Conferences. Hope to see you at the Santa Clara Marriott.

If you are unable to attend, I will give a summary of these important sessions in this space week after next.