Page 13 - Campus Technology, May/June 2019

Along with campus-specific uses, the universi- ty also expects to do outreach to the community in northeast Louisiana, allowing area K-12 stu- dents to come in and get VR experiences through tours created by Smithsonian and other sources.
The lab attaches to a room where a MakerBot 3D printer is set up, along with a small set of Macintosh computers. Students will be able to design objects with the VR setup and then send those files to the 3D printer for production. Hoover is hoping that other prototyping print- ers on campus that are underused will make their way to that area to create a farm of 3D printers for broader use.
To help faculty learn how to exploit the new gear, the university is in the process of hiring a director of instructional technology. An existing Moodle group on campus has been repurposed and additional staff added too as part of setting up a dedicated instructional technology unit.
Find What Works Well and Move On
Early on, the university circulated a $9 million pro- posal to redo the library from the ground up. A lot of the funding would have gone to construction matters — adding rooms, changing vents for HVAC and related details. What Hoover, Lowe and Eppi- nette tried to accomplish was a redesign that didn’t require any structural changes on the building at all.
“We were very deliberate in that,” said Hoover. “I started off most meetings by saying, ‘You know what, we didn’t win the lottery — but we do have money.’ We’re not going to have all the furniture in the world. We’re going to do one floor at a time, and it might take two or three years. But this one floor is going to be nice. And then we’re going to see what works well and move to the next floor.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
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Photo: University of Louisiana Monroe