This paper discusses a trial of offering two senior/first-year graduate classes in a 7-week format, one following the other.Thus, a student could complete two courses (6-credits), dealing with two closely related topics, in one semester.In this case, the courses were Digital Communication Systems and Wireless Communications.During the first week of the first 7-week course, all of the in-class demonstrations and hands-on experiences needed to be shifted to online/remote delivery.This was primarily accomplished using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AppStream, cloud computing system.The planned real-world signal capture and analysis project changed to an optional attendance of a technical conference.All of our students choose to attend this conference at their own expense.This paper will discuss these challenges and provide a selected assessment.

Implementation of Hands-on Home-based Laboratory for Two Electrical Engineering Courses (A Pilot Study) Abstract Across the spectrum of higher education the delivery of instruction is changing. These changes are predominantly driven by the shrinking pool of traditional 18-22 year old students, the need for working adults to remotely have access to education, and most recently, the abrupt shift to online instruction secondary to the COVID-19 pandemic. Engineering education is not immune to these new dynamics, and institutions need to plan and prepare to embrace new modalities of instruction. Historically, electrical engineering courses have had lab requirements that have involved physical presence in a laboratory with several pieces of test equipment available for testing circuits. In recent years, computer-based laboratory equipment has become available that can provide the same robustness needed to facilitate learning for online electrical engineering courses. A pilot study was conducted at our institution using a home-based laboratory for two electrical engineering courses (Microcontrollers and Electric Circuit Analysis). Presented will be the development of the labs, implementation of the pilot study, description of the labs, and assessment.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 3532 COMPUTER INTERFACES FOR TEACHING THE NINTENDO® GENERATION Thad B. Welch, Brian Jenkins Department of Electrical Engineering U.S. Naval Academy, MD Cameron H. G. Wright Department of Electrical Engineering U.S. Air Force Academy, CO 1. Introduction The utilization of the computer in the classroom is well documented and continues to grow in both availability and capability. The number of papers, e.g. (1-3) discussing the use of software such as MATLAB, as well as the number of textbooks, e.g. (4-8) that now offer companion disks or CD- ROMs clearly validates this statement. Where it is not at all uncommon for a Professor to require the use of commercially available software in a course or lab, the introduction of educational software designed to facilitate the understanding of a particular topic at the junior/senior level of the Electrical Engineering curriculum has not been as pervasive. For example, the use of MATLAB and its toolboxes has become commonplace at a large number of universities. MATLAB has allowed students to explore various aspects of the course material in greater depth, and Professors and textbook authors regularly provide additional MATLAB m-files to demonstrate a particular phenomenon or effect. The majority of these m-files are command line based and require more sophistication to glean the important lesson. In contrast, a well designed graphical user interface (GUI) driving this same m-file can largely reduce the need for user sophistication by guiding the student through what may have otherwise been a nearly infinite number of input parameter possibilities. 2. Discussion This guiding of the students sounds appealing, but are we discouraging intellectual curiosity? Or even worse, are we entertaining instead of educating our students? To begin to address these questions, we turn to ASEE's PRISM magazine and rely on its longstanding commitment to articles on teaching. Recent examples include: From What Is Good Teaching9, "Good teaching involves five basic components", "... instructional methods that facilitate student involvement, ..."

An invited paper for a special session entitled “My Favorite Signal Processing Homework Problems.” Abstract: The use of recorded real-world audio signals tends to motivate almost all of the students in our signal processing classes. Early in any course where analog-to-digital conversion is presented, the topic of aliasing is always discussed. One of our favorite, three-part homework problems is to: 1. import an instructor provided recording of an audio frequency whistle (a chirp) into MATLAB, 2. plot its spectrogram, and 3. identify aliasing on the spectrogram. Given the rich harmonic structure of the provided signal, aliasing is clearly present on the properly implemented spectrogram.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract HDL Based Design Problems For Computer Architecture Abstract A computer architecture course is a necessary component in a computer engineering curriculum. Students in related disciplines such as electrical engineering and computer science may also value course concepts in the development of their elective coursework. There are many excellent computer architecture textbooks available to illuminate the difficult concepts encountered within the topic area. Many contain detailed designs of various architectures and configurations. To enhance the design skills and allow students to observe the dynamic operation of specific computer architectures, a series of Verilog Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL) design exercises were developed for a senior/graduate level course in computer architecture. The exercises allowed students to begin with basic review exercises on HDL design techniques and progress to fully operational computer architectures. The exercises were directly based and coupled with architectures presented in the course textbook by Mano and Kime. Student feedback indicated the exercises significantly enhanced their design skills and their overall understanding of computer architecture concepts. Students also demonstrated the capability to analyze more complex computer architectures and synthesize advanced components of a computer architecture and apply their knowledge to challenging open-ended design projects. Although originally developed for the Mano and Kime textbook, the design exercises described may be used with any computer architecture text. Overview There are many tools used in the design of microprocessors and microcontrollers to increase their speed and performance: manufacturing/processing, software development, and computer architecture. Previous advances in computer architecture were made possible by the reduction of the transistor size and performance and enhancement in architecture design. More recent computer architecture enhancements have focused on multiple cores and parallel processing in design. It is essential that computer architecture students understand the fundamental concepts as well as advanced techniques [1]. Computer architectures have evolved over many years and today there are many different types of computer architectures. Some are made for the general user, while others focus on a specific application. To help develop these architectures, engineers often use a Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL). In some cases, the HDL models can be compiled and implemented into field-programmable gate arrays FPGAs for further testing or even mask layouts for final or near-final production. Each processor manufacturer has its own specific procedures to move a design to the production phase. This being said, HDL based designs are clearly advantageous in academics, implying a need for homework based on HDL. This paper describes a series of homework assignments that have been recently developed to enhance the instruction of complex computer architectures using Verilog HDL as a design vehicle. The organization of these homework assignments attempts to show students the link between

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Using Inexpensive Hardware and Software Tools to Teach Software Defined Radio Abstract Signal processing topics such as software defined radio are more easily taught by using demonstra- tions and laboratory experiences that pique the students’ interest. This paper describes a new, inexpensive software defined radio educational platform based upon M ATLAB and the Texas Instruments C6713 dig- ital signal processing starter kit. We describe the various hardware and software issues and discuss how such a platform can be used in the classroom. 1 INTRODUCTION Software defined radio (SDR) is a topic that is becoming increasingly necessary as part of either a digital signal processing (DSP) course or a digital communications course at most universities today, with the target audience being both undergraduate and graduate students. In the past, even when the theoretical aspects of SDR have been covered in such courses, actual demonstrations and lab exercises for students are rare, and even when given they are typically limited to a simple M ATLAB simulation. We believe that adding a hardware aspect to the presentation of SDR, with hands-on opportunities for students, greatly enhances their mastery of this important topic, as we have advocated for similar DSP topics in the past.1, 2 This paper describes a new, inexpensive SDR educational platform based upon custom M ATLAB data acquisition code capable of real-time operation with the Texas Instruments C6713 DSP starter kit (DSK). 2 TEACHING SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO 2.1 How Much Detail? One of the challenges in teaching a topic such as SDR to such a diverse student audience is to decide how much detail to include. One or more entire courses could be devoted to SDR and multirate digital communications,3, 4 but we are often limited to just a few lectures and perhaps one demonstration and/or lab exercise. In this situation, we consider the ideas of rate conversion and first-order bandpass sampling to be fundamental to getting students comfortable with the general ideas of SDR.5, 6 More detail can be added if time is available in the course, or can be included in a follow-on course for interested students. With this in mind, students must be convinced of three things: 1) that the “gospel” of Fs ≥ 2fmax (i.e., sampling at least twice the highest signal frequency) that they learned regarding lowpass sampling is only a special case, 2) that for bandpass signals the selection of sampling frequency is more complicated, and that 3) aliasing is not always a bad thing. By choosing Fs properly, aliasing places the signal spectrum where we want it, yet avoids the overlapping of spectral replicas that would render the signal useless.7, 8 A bandpass signal is one where the energy is constrained to lie only between a lower frequency of fL and an upper frequency of fU . Thus the bandwidth of this signal is B = fU − fL . One useful form of the expression for predicting the range of acceptable sample frequencies for such a bandpass signal is Q Q−1 2B ≤ Fs ≤ 2B (1) n n−1 where Q = fU /B, and n is an integer such that 1 ≤ n ≤ ⌊Q⌋. In most real-world examples, the signal’s frequency content is already specified, leaving n as the first choice the students must learn to

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract The DSP of an Unstable Financial Account Abstract This paper discusses a simple framework that can be used to connect a significant num- ber of the tools and techniques developed in a first course in either discrete-time signals and systems or digital signal processing. While this framework is not revolutionary, it allows for the rapid placement of new material into the course’s context. Additionally, a simple model of an unstable financial system allows for a rapid introduction and overview of the course while observably increasing student interest and motivation. In these challenging economic times, it is somewhat reassuring to know that some unstable financial accounts are actually a good thing! 1 INTRODUCTION It is widely known that even in the classroom “first impressions” are long lasting. Given this fact, we believe that the first impressions that our students develop related to either discrete-time signals and systems (DTSS) or digital signal processing (DSP) should be both memorable and inspirational. Pedagogically, it also makes considerable sense during a topic’s introduction to give a complete overview of that material before continuing on into the details. This approach to teaching has wide ranging consequences. Specifically it can, • Create a framework upon which the course is based • Encourage and motivate the students regarding the importance of the new material • Rapidly place the new material into context • Provide the necessary structure to prevent “global learners” from becoming lost and frus- trated The first and probably most important of these bullets is to create a framework upon which the course is based. One example of this concept is illustrated in Fig. 1 in which the vast majority of the new tools, techniques, and mathematical procedures that an entry level student will study concerning DTSS or DSP are depicted. Specifically, the six bubbles of this figure represent major topics, if not entire chapters, of a textbook. At the end of a first DSP course, students should be able to comfortably move between the six bubbles shown. We call this figure “the DSP big picture,” in that we constantly refer back to it as we relate past, present, and future DSP topics. Once this framework is established, an appropriate and memorable example is necessary to quickly demonstrate these concepts.

This paper describes a second year, follow-on study in which 4th and 5th grade students were exposed to engineering-related topics using a microcontroller, input/output circuitry, sensors, and the associated software coding needed to achieve a desired functionality of the hardware. The first year study was described in a paper presented at the 2017 ASEE Annual Conference. This second year study took students to the “next level,” and showed very promising results.

For Students By Students: Labware and Courseware Development AbstractWe have successfully implemented a program whereby students develop labware and courseware forother students. We have called this approach “For Students By Students or FSBS.” In this programstudents as either a senior design or graduate level project design, prototype and implement laboratoryequipment and courseware for use by other students. This has proven to be a very effective approachto provide for up-to-date laboratory labware and courseware in rapidly changing disciplines such aselectrical and computer engineering on a limited budget. More importantly, participating students gainvaluable real world experience in designing, prototyping, and delivery a system with accompanyingsupport docuementation. In this paper we review 10 successful projects that have been completed overthe past decade using the FSBS approach. We also provide a case study for replacing the lab trainer andlabware for a microcontroller course based on the Freescale S12 microprocessor. We also provide step-by-step methodology to implement this program.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 1232 An Integrated Approach to Teaching Engineering Courses Peter W. de Graaf, Cameron H. G. Wright, Michael J. Walker Department of Electrical Engineering U.S. Air Force Academy, CO Thad B. Welch Department of Electrical Engineering U.S. Naval Academy, MD ABSTRACT Many undergraduate engineering students have difficulty understanding the connections between the different engineering courses they are required to take. Too many of them focus on learning just the details of a specific course without any consideration of how the concepts fit with those of other courses. The integrated approach to teaching engineering involves a “systems view” to the curriculum. In this approach, one or more systems are presented to the students early in their engineering program. Throughout their courses, the students are reminded of where they are in the system. A specific example is discussed of how this approach is being used as a test case with five courses in the electrical engineering curriculum at the United States Air Force Academy. The resulting improvement in student performance is also discussed. INTRODUCTION The typical undergraduate engineering student sees most of his or her courses as a collection of facts and formulas. Most students focus on memorizing these facts and formulas and how to use them to solve specific problems. The focus of their efforts tends to be the problems presented through examples in assigned readings, homework, and laboratory exercises. They concentrate on learning very specific applications of the concepts and ideas presented in the course. This approach to learning gives the students a very narrow view of the material presented in a particular course. This problem is of particular concern in an environment where the student has a limited amount of time to devote to a particular course. In this case, the student will prioritize the focus of his/her study efforts to concentrate on those areas that seem most likely to appear on an examination. In essence, the students are learning in a vacuum: learning to pass an examination, rather than to understand the broader applications of the material. The motivation to use the integrated approach described in this paper came from a desire on the part of the authors to improve the understanding of students in senior-level electrical engineering courses. At this level, students should have a rudimentary understanding of how the major concepts presented in an undergraduate engineering curriculum “fit” together. For example, they should see that a fundamental understanding of linear systems is a key to understanding the basics of analog communications. 1

An enhancement to MATLAB written by the authors makes teaching various real-world DSP concepts easier and more effective.These enhancements eliminate the need to purchase expensive specialized software programs for this purpose.The particular DSP concept described in this paper is an interactive demonstration showing how quantization of digital filter coefficients, which is inevitable with widely-used fixed-point DSP hardware, adversely affects filter performance.

Both the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Wyoming offer a wide variety of electrical engineering courses concerning communications.Additionally, required design courses offer opportunities for exposure to a wide variety of real-world communication systems and topics.Whether these courses are discussing the basics of analog and digital communications, or the details of advanced digital modulation schemes and error performance, until very recently, we have found it exceeding difficult to perform communications systems demonstrations and the subsequent signal analysis without a phenomenal amount of specialized hardware and personal effort.This all changed when both schools started using a National Instrument (NI) vector signal analyzer (VSA) and vector signal generator (VSG).Both of these functions are contained within a standalone PXI chassis.These hardware functions are enabled and controlled by LabView and the vast array of toolkits available from NI.This paper discusses the use of this hardware and software in both the lecture and design environment.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2793 A Signal Analyzer for Teaching Signals and Systems Thad B. Welch and Christopher. T. Field U.S. Naval Academy Cameron H.G. Wright U.S. Air Force Academy Abstract Music and computers continue to fascinate today’s students. This powerful and sometimes addicting combination can also provide for a tremendous opportunity to enhance the understanding of the time and frequency domain relationships routinely discussed in a Signals and Systems course. This paper discusses a MATLAB -based program that allows for simultaneous signal analysis in the time and frequency domains. The program is menu-driven and very easy to learn and use. 1 Introduction The curriculum for most electrical engineering (EE) programs contains at least one course on Signals and Systems. While the majority of the concepts taught in a traditional first course on Signals and Systems date back more than a hundred years, today’s students still struggle with the relationship between the time and frequency domains. Any teaching technique that permits increased student insight into this complex relationship is of great value to both the professor and the student alike. Several tools exist to display signals in the time or frequency domain, but few offer the capability to rapidly, simultaneously, and accurately display the signal information in both domains. 2 Discussion Solving this problem with hardware would require, at a minimum, an oscilloscope and a dynamic signal analyzer. It can easily cost several thousand dollars just to equip a single lab station. System cost may only allow for a single demonstration system with which a professor or teaching assistant would demonstrate the time and frequency domain relationships between selected signals. These signals may be pre-recorded or generated in real-time. But what is the level of student involvement in such a demonstration? Do we really expect our students to understand such a complex relationship without the opportunity to spend time exploring other signals on their own? We want our students to explore these relationships in depth and at their Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Embedded Systems Design: Responding to the Challenge Abstract A recent IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer Online article indicated that U.S. institutions of higher learning need to provide embedded systems design programs. The article cited that “only a few colleges and universities have good embedded systems programs in place.” The article further mentioned that “many engineers in embedded systems development are getting close to retirement age.” In this paper we will outline our program in embedded systems development including coursework in microcontrollers, digital signal processors, programmable logic controllers, and embedded systems design. We provide education on embedded systems concepts starting with middle school enhancement programs through graduate level coursework. A common thread through these programs is heavy emphasis on design. The curriculum allows a student to become an expert in embedded systems or allows them to selectively choose certain portions to enhance and augment their chosen area of expertise. Much of the design exercises and laboratories have been developed by student engineers. As a case study, we will discuss recent efforts to expand our course and laboratory coverage of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). We made these modifications in response to our constituents in the field who requested engineers be better prepared to design industrial systems controlled by PLCs. Background In the February 2008 IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer Online, Mike Anderson, Chief Scientist of the PTR Group, Incorporated wrote a definitive article entitled, “Help Wanted: Embedded Engineers - Why the United States is losing its edge in embedded systems…[1]” An abbreviated version of the paper was later published in the IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer Digest in March 2008 [2]. In the article, Anderson describes the prevalent use of embedded systems in a wide variety of industries and notes that on average the citizen of an industrialized nation comes into contact with over 48 embedded systems everyday [1]. To be considered an embedded system Anderson notes it must operate in a constrained resource environment, be economically viable, interact with users and the environment, contain both hardware and software firmware, and operate on low power devices [1]. Anderson further notes that common design characteristics of an embedded system are resource limitations, the application of low power processors, battery operation, limited memory and storage, and the use of many features at low cost [1]. In addition to these design characteristics, Anderson indicates that an embedded design engineer must also be comfortable with the concepts of thermal loading, the MIPS/watts ratio, an intimate knowledge of the target hardware to the register level, and the software interaction with the registers. Furthermore, the engineer must be aware of the overhead involved with the specific choice of software compiler employed to program the target system [1]. Anderson laments that the U.S. is facing an embedded system developer shortage crisis. He notes that it is not the number of engineering graduates that are of concern; however, the

We propose a new method of instance-level microtubule (MT) tracking in time-lapse image series using recurrent attention. Our novel deep learning algorithm segments individual MTs at each frame. Segmentation results from successive frames are used to assign correspondences among MTs. This ultimately generates a distinct path trajectory for each MT through the frames. Based on these trajectories, we estimate MT velocities. To validate our proposed technique, we conduct experiments using real and simulated data. We use statistics derived from real time-lapse series of MT gliding assays to simulate realistic MT time-lapse image series in our simulated data. This data set is employed as pre-training and hyperparameter optimization for our network before training on the real data. Our experimental results show that the proposed supervised learning algorithm improves the precision for MT instance velocity estimation drastically to 71.3% from the baseline result (29.3%). We also demonstrate how the inclusion of temporal information into our deep network can reduce the false negative rates from 67.8% (baseline) down to 28.7% (proposed). Our findings in this work are expected to help biologists characterize the spatial arrangement of MTs, specifically the effects of MT-MT interactions.

After many years of practicing, reading and writing about signal processing education, we have observed some common themes. This paper discusses the trade-off of simulation versus the use of realtime processing on real-world signals as a motivator for signal processing students. A real-time DSP demonstration accompanies the presentation of this paper.

Microtubules are inherently dynamic sub-cellular filamentuous polymers that are spatially organized within the cell by motor proteins which cross-link and move microtubules. In-vitro microtubule motility assays, in which motors attached to a surface move microtubules along it, have been used traditionally to study motor function. However, the way in which microtubule-microtubule interactions affect microtubule movement remains largely unexplored. To address this question, time-lapse image series of in-vitro microtubule motility assays were obtained using total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. Categorized as a general problem of multiple object tracking (MOT), particular challenges arising in this project include low feature diversity, dynamic instability, sudden changes in microtubules motility patterns, as well as their instantaneous appearance/disappearance. This work describes a new application of piecewise-stationary multiple motion model Kalman smoother (PMMS) for modeling individual microtubules motility trends. To both evaluate the capability of this procedure and optimize its hyper-parameters, a large dataset simulating the series of time-lapse images was used first. Next, we applied it to the sequence of frames from the real data. Results of our analyses provide a quantitative description of microtubule velocity which, in turn, enumerates the occurrence of microtubule-microtubule interactions per frame.

Clinical assessment of a patient, monitoring the progress of a condition, and/or titration of a therapy is dependent on the metrological characteristics of diagnostic equipment. While metrological performance of instruments is commonly assessed in research, it is not so often done in clinical practice. Physical rehabilitation applications may benefit individuals with mental health concerns and are associated with an accurate analysis of balance and gait. There is a paucity of published data regarding the metrological characteristics of commonly used clinical instruments used in posturographic measurements. We desired to assess the accuracy, trueness, precision and resolution of four posturography systems that we use clinically in practice: a Bertec BP-5050, a Vestibular Technologies CAPS® Professional and a Vestibular Technologies CAPS® Lite threecomponent balance platforms, and a NeuroCom® Balance Manager SMART EquiTest®. Metrological performance by posturography instruments was recommended in 2013 by the International Standardization Committee for Clinical Stabilometry of the International Society for Posture and Gait Research (ISPGR). Clinical and research findings may be erroneous, or at the least misleading, if the instruments used to make clinical decisions are associated with significant error. We suggest that there is a strong need for posturographic instrumentation with appropriate metrological characteristics used in clinical applications. The ISPRG recommendations appear to be reasonable and appropriate, and our results show they are obtainable. Physical measurements and functional testing used to correlate and design mental health and physical based rehabilitation strategies are often dependent upon the accuracy and metrological integrity of diagnostic instruments used in posturography.

This paper describes an investigation into part of the mechanical mechanisms underlying the formation of mitotic spindle, the cellular machinery responsible for chromosomal separation during cell division. In normal eukaryotic cells, spindles are composed of microtubule filaments that radiate outward from two centrosomes. In many transformed cells, however, centrosome number is misregulated resulting in cells with more than two centrosomes. Addressing the question of how these cells accommodate these additional structures by coalescing supernumerary centrosomes to form normal spindles will provide a powerful insight toward understanding the proliferation of cancer cells and developing new therapeutics. The process of centrosome coalescence is thought to involve motor proteins that function to slide microtubules relative to one another. Here we use in vitro motility assays combined with fluorescence microscopy to visualize, characterize and quantify microtubule-microtubule interactions. After segmenting the microtubules, their speed and direction of movement are the extracted features to cluster their interaction type. In order to evaluate the potential of our processing algorithm, we created a simulated dataset similar to the time-lapse series. Once our procedure has been optimized using the simulated data, we will apply it to the real data. Results of our analyses will provide a quantitative description of interaction among microtubules. This is a potentially important step toward more thorough understanding of cancer.

Veteran’s Transition Course at the University of Wyoming In late January 2011, two faculty members at the University of Wyoming (UW) with over 50 years of combined military service were contacted about establishing a transition course for returning veterans by the UW Veterans Transition Task Force. As veterans themselves, they were honored to be asked to serve fellow veterans in this capacity. To construct this course, they elicited the assistance of experts in veterans’ affairs and challenges including: • Army Reserve Officer Training Commander (Army ROTC) and staff • Air Force Reserve Officer Training Commander (USAF ROTC) and staff • Veterans Affairs, Local Recovery Coordinator • Veterans Affairs representative, Associate Dean of Students • Various information sources including “Combat2College” (combat2college.org) The goals of this course are to provide returning veterans: • A smooth transition to college life (time management skills, financial management, wellness skills) • Basic tools for academic success (basic writing skills, library skills, oral presentation skills, and advising) • Information on resources available to returning veterans (VA benefits, academic services, career services) • A sense of community, camaraderie and belonging (interaction with fellow veterans, community service opportunities) • Information on veteran related challenges (post-traumatic stress disorder awareness, AWARE (Alcohol Wellness Alternatives, Research, & Education), Gateway suicide prevention training, and stress reduction techniques) • Originally, the course counted for University (General) Studies credit for the Intellectual Community (I) and the Information Literacy (L) component and Communication. The course began as a “small footprint” course of one semester hour. That is, a course framework was developed such that any interested colleague could teach this course. Attempts were made to use already existing resources wherever possible. In mid-2015, to accommodate the major revision of the University Studies Program (i.e., general studies) at the University of Wyoming, the course was expanded to three semester hours, with additional material for written, oral, and digital communication. This added communication material was presented in such a way as to provide an effective bridge between the communication style common in a military environment, and the communication style expected in a university environment. This made the course more approachable for veterans than a more traditional course covering those topics. This revised version of the course was first taught in the Spring semester of 2016. The revised course counts as a Communication 2 (COM2) for USP; a typical COM2 course would be a second non-majors English course. This course has been taught annually since 2011. In this paper we share course development, content, evolution over time, successes, and area for further improvement. Also, we discuss in detail additional veteran services provided by the campus Veteran Service Center that dovetail into the course. We expect to provide student feedback from previous students as a form of assessment.