Page 31 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM
For instance, when Indiana University embarked on its Mosaic Active Learning Initiative, its campus leaders wanted to stress the diversity of spaces involved. “When we launched Mosaic, we realized we didn’t want to land on one specific model, for a lot of reasons,” said Julie Johnston, director of learning spaces. “When we design a room, each one looks slightly different. We are going to create spaces and evolve them. We create a prototype, ideate and change it, so each one is like a tile in a mosaic.”
Usually a new space at Indiana is designed to meet a specific need or goal. “Some of our classrooms have a more apparent goal than others. Some would just fit the definition of flexible and active, but for others there is a real history behind how we designed it the way we did,” Johnston explained.
For instance, an Immersive Showcase Classroom on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus was designed to investigate the interactive, immersive experience with students. It takes advantage a video wall that uses Mersive Solstice software to foster collaboration, decision-making and content sharing via any mobile device. The professor has the ability to project multiple points of contact wirelessly, so everybody in the room can participate, Johnston said.
Another example at IU: A proposal from the departments of Geography and Anthropology resulted in a Collaboration
San Diego State University’s Learning Glass Studio
Learning Studio designed to bring active learning to classes with large numbers of students. The room has 16 collaborative tables accommodating 120 students. Students can share their work on a 20-foot video wall. Each student collaborative table is equipped with a 40- inch flat panel, PC/keyboard/mouse, VGA and HDMI laptop connections, cable cubby, controls for switching the content displayed, and (because the room is so large) a push-to-talk microphone. Students can switch the display source from the table’s PC to their laptops with the push of a button. Instructors can push content to the collaborative
table monitors, or display content from any of the table monitors on the video wall or projectors.
Mosaic, which rolled out in the fall of 2015, actually formalized a movement that was already happening on the IU Bloomington campus. “We started designing these spaces and realized that we could continue to do that, but the reality is that our goal is transformation in the classroom to active learning. It is difficult to do that by just creating spaces,” Johnston said. IU has a large group of fellows teaching in active learning spaces and researching the impact. “We believed that partnering with the faculty
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017
San Diego State University