Page 18 - College Planning & Management, March 2018

THE BIONIC CLASSROOM IS HERE.
Packed with technology, reconfigurable on a moment’s notice and ready to foster innovation,
these spaces help forward-thinking instructors educate next-generation students. College Planning & Management profiles five new spaces that push the edges.
By Amy Milshtein
Learning Innovation Center / Oregon State University
This 126,000-square-foot LEED
Gold building, designed by Bora Architects, is proving to be the most popular building on Oregon State University’s historic Corval- lis, OR, campus. A destination for studying and showing off
to visiting parents, the Learn-
ing Innovation Center (LINC) is heavily used from early morning until late at night. Professors vie to secure one of the classrooms, lecture halls, or learning studios. A group of students even snuck into the largest lecture hall to hold
a weekend party.
A variety of instructional
space holds between 60 to 600 students, while informal study and breakout areas wrap around the classrooms. No matter the size, the classrooms put the students close to the faculty, “pro- moting more active engagement in lieu of passive absorption of information,” according to Mi- chael Tingley, Bora principal. “In the arena classrooms, students face each other while learning, promoting the same shared expe-
rience and sense of purpose that have characterized other arena environments through history.”
The 600-seat lecture hall is designed “in the round,” with the professor in the middle. To ease the transition, Bora worked with OSU’s Technology Across the Curriculum program to train teachers on how to move throughout the space.
“The shape of the room en- courages instructors’ mobility so that they avoid having their back to any one section of students for an extended period of time,” says Amy Donohue, Bora principal. “The swiveling central podium facilitates this movement, and the circular screens allow faculty to see their content without wor- rying that their technology is operating properly.”
Preliminary data gathered from the new spaces indicate that students are more engaged in this setting, that it directly af- fects the way they learn, and that this translates into better grades and greater class retention.
18 WEBCPM.COM / MARCH 2018
PHOTOS © STEVE MAYLONE