Every electronic engineer and technician must participate in some form of continuing education if he or she intends to stay competent, retain a job and grow personally. As an engineer, technician or instructor, you live or die by what you know. To be successful in electronics you must know the latest technology and apply it to benefit your employer and to your company's customers. In an article for Electronic Design magazine a few years back, I wrote the following: "If you're not involved in some form of continuing education, then you are doomed to suffer the consequences of ignorance, peer contempt, technological obsolescence and eventual obscurity...and then you retire early." Does this sound like you?
I suspect that most practicing engineers do engage in some form of continuing education. But from what I have seen, not many instructors or professors from community college AAS degree electronic programs do. I hope I am wrong about you, but I bet I am not. Why? If instructors and professors were up to date with the latest knowledge, then the courses and curriculum would not be so out of whack with the real world. To say that today's curriculum is skewed from reality and that the instructors are living in some delusional world of the past is really being too kind. I'd like to use the phraseology of popular comedian Lewis Black, but that would not be professional. But for those of you who have heard Black's routine, you know what I mean. I can only attribute the the poor state of the curriculum to lack of adequate continuing education and exposure to actual technician and engineering work. I realize that as professors you cannot actually go out and get a job to see what it is really like, but you could at least engage in some kind of continuing education that would keep you informed about what is important and what is not. And that, hopefully, would lead to more current and relevant courses and curricula. I am probably just dreaming, but I can hope can't I?
Magazines
Continuing education need not be all that hard or time consuming or expensive. The fastest and easiest thing to do is subscribe to some of the many magazines devoted to electronics and related subjects. Most of the good publications are "controlled circulation" meaning that they are free. You cannot complain about the price. If you are a professor and engineer, just go to the relevant website and subscribe. The best ones are Electronic Design (this is the one I write for), EDN, and EE Times. The first two come out twice a month, the other weekly. If you do nothing more than read these three, you will be about as informed as possible about what is going on with components, circuits, technologies, applications, and issues.
One of the absolute best magazines is IEEE Spectrum. You have to join IEEE to get it but that is a good thing. Worth every penny. If you join you will also find out about all the other magazines they have and all of the other educational products and activities just for engineers. Check out www.ieee.org.
Then you should also subscribe to the only remaining popular hobbyiest/experimenter magazine, Nuts & Volts. It is a monthly and not that expensive. But it has lots of good articles and hands-on projects many of which are suitable for labs. Other good magazines to which you must actually subscribe are:
1. Circuit Cellar--Great magazine about embedded controllers, interfacing, etc.
2. Popular Communications--For those of you who teach communications and RF.
3. QST and CQ--The traditional ham radio magazines. Good sources.
4. Servo--A magazine devoted to hobby robots by the publishers of Nuts & Volts. Excellent articles and projects.
There are a whole slew of other magazines, but these are the core. Just reading these each month will keep you on top.
Conferences
Another good continuing education activity is attending conferences. The educational conferences like ASEE and SAME-TEC (matec.org) are good, but I am talking about electronics- related events. There are so many that I cannot even begin to list them all. If you read the magazines, you will hear about these events. And yes, they are expensive. But the sessions, workshops, and exhibits are so overwhelmingly good that you will come away with a head full of fresh knowledge, a whole new perspective and lots of good ideas. I recommend at least one a year. Try to put the expenses for this into your annual budget. It is worth it, believe me. Just try one and see.
Books
Books are always good for updating yourself. You can get some of them free for evaluation from publishers. But most you cannot. You will need a budget for this too. Books got expensive and the better ones approach $100 each and many exceed that. Your best bet to find these is to go to Amazon and search by subject. Otherwise, go directly to the publishers lists. Some of the better sources are Elsevier/Newnes, McGraw Hill, John Wiley, IEEE, Prentice Hall, ArchTech House, Noble, Addison Wesley, and Cambridge University Press. If you buy from Amazon, you can often find a used copy for much less. I usually buy used myself when they are available. Most are still in good condition.
Seminars and Workshops
Seminars and workshops still occur from time to time. These are given by private companies and university continuing education departments and are very expensive. They are really good, but probably beyond your budget. For some cheap and even free seminars check out the major semiconductor manufacturers who give annual workshops. Examples: Analog Devices, Freescale, and Texas Instruments.
Webinars, free online seminars have become amazingly popular. Most are given by companies promoting their products. But don't let that stop you as all of them give basics and fundamentals and other useful information. And don't forget, that the real engineering world is nothing but commercial components and products. You live and die by your knowledge of them. A good source of webinars is the TechOnLine website.
Back to School
As for going back to school for an advance degree, I say forget it. Most of you probably already have a masters anyway. If you do not have one, it probably is worth the time, effort and money if you are not approaching retirement in a few years. You get a good return on you investment. Not so for a PhD, at least in a community college. It is nice to have, but you won't get any more out of it than being able to say you are Doctor so-and-so. Some people do it just for that. Anyway, check out the National Technological University who can give you a fully accredited masters online.
Online Learning
As I travel around for the magazine, I interview lots of engineers and executives. I ask them what they do to learn new things. They all mention briefly the things I mentioned above to some degree or the other. But...and here is the big secret.... most learn from the Internet. Busy professionals don't typically have the time to go to class for general education. Most have very specific learning needs related to the job, a current project or some future interest. Almost every one of these people gets that education informally with a Google or Yahoo search. Just type in the topic you want to learn, and voila', you get thousands of hits. Print it out, sort it, organize it, read it and then you know. You can give yourself a quickie education on virtually subject any time. It is fast, easy, and free. Give it a try.
An Experimentation Bench
One last thing. Personal experimentation. If you are a real tech, you probably have a bench where you still build kits, play around with circuits, fix defective products, etc. Nothing beats this kind of hands-on work. You can still learn a great deal by just doing practical real world experimenting. Get yourself a breadboard trainer, some parts, a DMM and a scope and play around. Play engineer as you were educated. If you don't have a shop of your own, do it in the school lab. It is fun and educational. Maybe I am just an incurable techie or geek....whatever...but I still do this.
And go learn something new.
Copyright 2006 Louis E. Frenzel Jr.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Instructors Teach What They Want, Not What is Needed
It being summer and all, I don't suspect many of you are reading this blog. It is a relief to take the summer off and get away from the stresses of academia, especially if it is Electronic Technology where there is little good news about enrollments. But for those of you still monitoring this site, here is something I wanted to get off my chest for a while. This is one subject I have been wanting to comment on for some time now. It affects all of us who teach and it certainly has an impact on our students and the employers who will eventually hire them.
At a department meeting in the college where I teach occasionally, we were discussing curriculum changes and changes to course content to bring each course up to date. As those discussions often go, we got into a harangue about teaching bipolar transistors and biasing methods. Many of us know that it is a rare thing indeed if an AAS graduate technician ever really does have to know ten ways to bias a BJT. It just never comes up in the real world. Most textbooks still go on and on about that subject and many instructors teach all the gory details like load lines, temperature stabilization, etc. The recommendation was to drop all of that and expand coverage of MOSFETs since over 80% of all electronic circuits today use MOSFETs and not BJTs. We should still teach that BJTs need bias and give an example or two but it is not purdent to spend half the semester teaching it in lieu of far more important stuff that never gets included.
Anyway, and here is the core of this note, one of the instructors said and I paraphrase, "Lou, you can change the content and curriculum all you want, but I am still going to teach it the way I have always been teaching it for the past 15 years." Within that statement you have a clear picture of what is wrong with Electronics Technology education today. It includes an attitude problem as well as a rejection of adding any thing new or relevant. No wonder programs are so dated. The instructors fail to change. They are hell-bent not to change. Are you one of them?
I got to thinking about this attitude and approach and realized that most instructors practice it to some degree. Especially the part about teaching what they want. Instructors tend to teach what is familiar and subjects they like and are intimately familiar with. For one thing they never have to waste time learning anything new. Just walk into class and spout the same old stuff semester after semester, even if that subject is obsolete. When a colleague of mine said, "Lou, we are just teaching the history of electronics." I couldn't help but agree fully. I had a professor in college that continued to teach vacuum tube circuits because he felt that the concepts were still valid. While that may be partially true, think of what we were not learning about transistors.
It is not a tragedy to teach older concepts and they are often useful as perspective and conceptual. But, in an AAS program where time is of the essence, it is almost a criminal act to use up what precious semester time we have teaching non-relevant material when so much new and essential concepts, products, technologies do not get taught. It is appalling to me to see this. It hurts our graduates and their future employers.
Look, we all teach what we want and like. I find myself doing it. But at least I try to include the new material. And in most cases, at least with me, what I want and like is the new and interesting technologies that turn me on. Am I so weird that I like to learn new stuff on a regular basis? I must be as so many of my colleagues hate the idea. Are you so lazy that you cannot be bothered to devote some time to learning what is new and relevant? Evidentally.
Let me get a bit preachy here. It is ok to teach what you know and like. But, each time you teach it, try to drop one dated subject and replace it with a newer and more relevant subject. If you did that every time you taught the course, the whole course would gradually be updated as would you. Why not give that a try? Your reward is the lightening of your guilt.
At a department meeting in the college where I teach occasionally, we were discussing curriculum changes and changes to course content to bring each course up to date. As those discussions often go, we got into a harangue about teaching bipolar transistors and biasing methods. Many of us know that it is a rare thing indeed if an AAS graduate technician ever really does have to know ten ways to bias a BJT. It just never comes up in the real world. Most textbooks still go on and on about that subject and many instructors teach all the gory details like load lines, temperature stabilization, etc. The recommendation was to drop all of that and expand coverage of MOSFETs since over 80% of all electronic circuits today use MOSFETs and not BJTs. We should still teach that BJTs need bias and give an example or two but it is not purdent to spend half the semester teaching it in lieu of far more important stuff that never gets included.
Anyway, and here is the core of this note, one of the instructors said and I paraphrase, "Lou, you can change the content and curriculum all you want, but I am still going to teach it the way I have always been teaching it for the past 15 years." Within that statement you have a clear picture of what is wrong with Electronics Technology education today. It includes an attitude problem as well as a rejection of adding any thing new or relevant. No wonder programs are so dated. The instructors fail to change. They are hell-bent not to change. Are you one of them?
I got to thinking about this attitude and approach and realized that most instructors practice it to some degree. Especially the part about teaching what they want. Instructors tend to teach what is familiar and subjects they like and are intimately familiar with. For one thing they never have to waste time learning anything new. Just walk into class and spout the same old stuff semester after semester, even if that subject is obsolete. When a colleague of mine said, "Lou, we are just teaching the history of electronics." I couldn't help but agree fully. I had a professor in college that continued to teach vacuum tube circuits because he felt that the concepts were still valid. While that may be partially true, think of what we were not learning about transistors.
It is not a tragedy to teach older concepts and they are often useful as perspective and conceptual. But, in an AAS program where time is of the essence, it is almost a criminal act to use up what precious semester time we have teaching non-relevant material when so much new and essential concepts, products, technologies do not get taught. It is appalling to me to see this. It hurts our graduates and their future employers.
Look, we all teach what we want and like. I find myself doing it. But at least I try to include the new material. And in most cases, at least with me, what I want and like is the new and interesting technologies that turn me on. Am I so weird that I like to learn new stuff on a regular basis? I must be as so many of my colleagues hate the idea. Are you so lazy that you cannot be bothered to devote some time to learning what is new and relevant? Evidentally.
Let me get a bit preachy here. It is ok to teach what you know and like. But, each time you teach it, try to drop one dated subject and replace it with a newer and more relevant subject. If you did that every time you taught the course, the whole course would gradually be updated as would you. Why not give that a try? Your reward is the lightening of your guilt.
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