Page 70 - spaces4learning, Fall 2024

s p a c e s 4 l e a rn i n g
LEARNING SPACE DESIGN
Some of our most complained about classrooms are rooms in our
optometry school that I inherited. Every one of those classrooms
has 12 displays, including a mixture of projectors and 75-inch
high-def displays that are supposed to be 3D, and multiple cam-
eras—it is like the biggest conglomeration of everything that
they could throw together, and it doesn’t work. The faculty just
want to come in, turn on a couple of the screens, and teach.
Park: On the planning side, we’re trying to be more inclusive early
in the conversation about what the needs are to meet the pedagogical
goals of a particular program. I’ve made it a mantra to include you all—
Lisle and Chris and Teddy—in those conversations from day one,
because we shouldn’t be designing things that are not standard or
supportable within your resources on the campus. For the general-use
classroom, what works for an English department might not work
for geology, but it’s a conversation that needs to be had. And the
most successful projects are the ones where the faculty get engaged
in how technology can better
support pedagogy.
Waldron: A long time
ago, on a planet far away, I
commissioned a study to ask:
Is our technological design
learning-oriented? Or is it
really just a technology box?
And what I generally found is
that we’re doing a lot of tech-
nology box work. We had all
this complex, cool stuff in sin-
gle rooms. They weren’t sus-
tainable, they weren’t repeat-
able. You could get accolades
for this one room, but then
there would be 100 rooms that
didn’t have anything done well
in there. Once we got to the table of okay, where does this tech-
nology fit pedagogically in terms of supporting teaching and
learning, I was able to take a Jet Blue, Southwest approach to
my classrooms, where all the classrooms are effectively the same.
If I have to bring an auditorium on stream tomorrow, what I
need on that touch panel is what they’re going to be interacting
and interfacing with the most, to facilitate the broadest reach
in terms of teaching and learning. So we’ve really worked on
standardizing those things.
S4L: What do students need from
technology and design to create the best
HyFlex learning experience?
Dechter: In a modern, hybrid-capable space, people have to
be able to see and be seen, hear and be heard, and get access to the
content. One of the big things that I’ve been doing a lot is dedi-
cated whiteboard cameras. I just made that part of my standard
“IF YOU WRITE MORE THAN
HALF A PAGE ON HOW TO USE
A SYSTEM, YOU SCREWED
UP—GO BACK AND REDO
IT. IF YOU HAVE TO DO
DOCUMENTATION, MAKE
IT A HALF PAGE OR LESS,
LAMINATE IT, AND PUT IT ON
THE LECTERN, BECAUSE NO
ONE’S GOING TO STAND IN
FRONT OF 100 STUDENTS AND
READ THE MANUAL.”
build, because it’s a relatively small expense and it takes that
big writable surface at the front, the side, wherever it may be in
the room, and gets that into your streaming platform of choice.
One thing I try to avoid doing is telling people what software
they have to be using. We do not have a standardized platform
on campus. If someone wants Zoom, if they want Teams, if they
want Google, if they want WebEx, we will make that work. The
systems are such that it’s providing that standard capability to
any platform, so that I am not the one defining how they have to
teach in their spaces. From the student standpoint, are they on a
phone? Are they on a tablet? Are they on a shared device at home?
Are they on a Chromebook? Most modern platforms will support
that regardless of where they are, using shared technologies like
WebRTC and things like that, so it’s not creating another barrier
to entry for anybody.
You have to provide something that’s going to be flexible, sim-
ple to use, and adaptable to whatever platform people are most
comfortable with using. If you
provide a system that is clunky
to use and difficult for people
to access, they will create their
own. Students are going to bring
in whatever software they are
most comfortable with. They’ll
create a giant shared Google doc,
take notes together, and share
files. The reason they do that
is that whatever they come up
with—security be damned—
is easier than whatever locked-
down, managed, maintained,
very expensive system that
you’re trying to get people to
use. So don’t create something
like that if it creates a barrier to
entry and disenfranchises peo-
ple who are there to teach and learn.
Waldron: Because my school is multi-island, multi-campus,
I have many instances where I have to do teaching between cam-
puses. And we’ve found, in terms of student equity, it’s really
important to ensure that at that far site, those students do not
feel as if they’re in a different space. Things like that sometimes
come down to something as simple as the direction that I’ve ori-
ented the confidence monitor, so that when faculty are looking
at the virtual space, they’re also looking intentionally at their
physical classroom.
We do have spaces where an abundance of technology is
needed—but everything that’s in the room is there intention-
ally. I’m not going to have a beamforming microphone array
in a space where I’m not doing any hybrid instruction or cam-
pus-to-campus instruction—that’s a waste of thousands of USD
MSRP to get it done. Unlike Christopher’s case, we’ve been for-
tunate that our faculty pretty much all use Zoom. Officially,
70 FALL 2024 | spaces4learning.com