Page 33 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM
fundraising and get a donor to put their name on it, and make it happen.” He said this has happened in the schools of accountancy, journalism and the learning design and technology program. “They have taken pieces they have experienced in our Learning Research Studios and put them together in their rooms and labs. We are seeing these ideas spreading to the edges of the campus.”
In fact, the Learning Glass Studio has already spawned an offshoot in two large lecture halls at SDSU. The instructors are using the Learning Glass, and their work is mirrored on enormous screens behind them. They are still keeping an eye on their students, and as they would in the smaller Learning Glass Studio, they are getting their students to come up and work through problems at the Learning Glass. It is all recorded, even in large lecture halls with 500 people. “That is something that came out of people wanting this technology — not just in that smaller, more intimate setting but in our larger spaces on campus,” Frazee said. “I don’t know of any other university using a Learning Glass in that way.”
Responding to Curricular Changes
New curricular requirements can lead to the redesign of either classroom spaces or student study spaces. When the University of Mount Union, a liberal arts college in Alliance, OH, added a Writing and Oral Communication (WOC) portfolio requirement to its general education
program, that eventually led to the creation of a new space within the library. Launched in 2015, the Digital, Written and Oral Communication (DWOC) Studio is part of a larger project to transform the library into a more modern learning commons.
“We used to be a traditional writing center on the second floor of the library,” said Danielle Cordaro, founding director of the DWOC. “But once we added oral communication to writing to be taught through the general education curriculum, the writing center didn’t fit the new need. We saw a drop-off in the number of folks coming to see us. We had to rethink what we were doing and change with the times.”
Cordaro worked with consultants and began researching the multi-literacy center movement, which she said is picking up steam in writing centers. She traveled to Eastern Kentucky University to see its Noel Studio for Academic Creativity, which integrates support services for writing, communication and research. She said the concept is starting to take off, but there are not yet many such spaces on U.S. campuses. “You may have a digital media center, a writing center and an oral communication center, but they are all administered separately. It is a new thing to have them under one roof, and it is somewhat controversial still — but the field seems to be moving in that direction.”
In designing the DWOC, Mount Union decided to create three zones. One is called the invention center, an open social
learning space with three whiteboard tables. Cordaro said that students love working on the whiteboards. “Our usage has skyrocketed 72 percent from the previous year, and one factor is those whiteboard tables.” Other zones include a quieter writing and speaking room where students can practice delivering presentations, and a multimedia production lab.
Cordaro said the new space was designed with the understanding that students will be asked to do more oral and multimedia presentations in their classes in the future. “We made the change because nobody was picking up the peer education part of that,” she said. “We have tutoring for almost every subject, especially ones we know students struggle with, such as math, chemistry or writing. We made a move with the curriculum and as the director I saw this as an unfilled need. We have to be a center that pushes the curriculum as well as serves the curriculum.”
Mount Union doesn’t have a teaching and learning center on campus, she noted. “I don’t see us as just a center for students. I do a lot of work with faculty, and I plan to do a lot more. They have to make both the writing and oral communication tasks part of the curriculum. Otherwise we will never see students in here working on anything. That is a curricular issue and a faculty development issue. We are working on it.”
David Raths is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017