CPET Seminar - Filling the Great Teaching Void: Unusual Teaching Concepts

Refreshements served before the seminar in East Bridge 108

Traditional university academic courses are often based on lectures, homework sets, examinations, and occasional laboratory exercises.  These types of courses are highly successful at encouraging the acquisition of new knowledge and skills for short term retention.  However, they fall far short of addressing key issues that are critical to professional success in science and technology.  This seminar is focused on a number of unusual teaching concepts that are designed to fill this gap at both undergraduate and graduate levels.  Key topics to be discussed include the concept of programmed failure, the incorporation of a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach, the development of homework problems with essential ambiguities as well as real world examples, the involvement of a design approach (understanding the role of constraints in both science and technology), the critical analysis of both textbook and literature illustrations as a key to understanding, the formulation of hypotheses as essential elements of the Scientific Approach (incorporated as a part of term research projects), and the importance of developing outstanding scientific presentations.

Armand R. Tanguay, Jr. is Professor of Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Biomedical Engineering, Ophthalmology, and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California. Professor Tanguay's current research programs are highly interdisciplinary in nature, and include the development of hybrid electronic/photonic multichip modules for vision applications; the design, fabrication, and testing of an intraocular camera to be used in conjunction with advanced conformal multielectrode arrays to form a retinal prosthesis for blindness induced by retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD); the use of human psychophysical techniques to develop optimal image acquisition and stimulation protocols for retinal prostheses with limited numbers of microstimulator electrodes; the study of lateral brightness and chromatic adaptation in the human visual system; and the search for the fundamental origins of layering throughout the human visual and cortical systems.

Professor Tanguay has served as an elected Faculty Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California from 2001 through 2005, and was named a Distinguished Faculty Fellow in May, 2005.  In addition, he was presented with a Teacher of the Year award in 2002 by the USC Latter Day Saint Student Association.