TechTalks Transcript
The Smart Classroom: What Is It In 2001?
November 15, 2001
Audio
• Streaming
MP3
• Download
MP3 (Download
Tips)
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Malcolm Brown [MB] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for fall of 2001 and to this session on The Smart Classroom: What Is It in 2001? You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you with the support of our CREN member institutions and Blackboard.com. Blackboard powers eLearning and related commerce in the academic marketplace. Be sure also to check out the alliance with Online Learning for a discount on eLearning with Blackboard courses. And now I'd like to welcome Howard Strauss of Princeton, our Tech Talk anchor, and Howard is a well-known web technology expert and portal expert. Welcome, Howard. Are you in a smart classroom today?
HS: No, I'm actually in a dumb office today, Judith! By any definition, and I'll have more to say about that in just a moment.
JB: Okay.
HS: As you might guess. Anyway, as Judith said, I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest expert, Malcolm Brown from Dartmouth, that will answer the questions you'd like answered about smart classrooms and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue-and we love to have you do this-by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your question during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive. A smart classroom, as Judith mentioned, could be many things, but I think it is a place that helps people learn. Learning is actually done in one's head, but it is assisted by good instruction. Therefore, smart classrooms should improve both learning and instruction, with the emphasis on instruction because we have more control of it. In trying to find great examples of smart classrooms, I pointed my web browser to MIT's Media Lab where the very latest applications of technology are often found. Oops! Hey, there we go! We don't have smart paper here either!
JB: New advance that we can look forward to.
HS: Right, right. There I found a host of smart things-smart rooms, smart chairs, smart desks, smart clothes and smart homes, just to name a few. The Media Lab points out with some disdain that, and I quote, "current existing chairs are passive objects that need to be adjusted by the user instead of automatically adapting to the user's need." As I sit in my hopelessly out-of-date, passive chair that does not anticipate my every whim, I have some trepidation about what a Media Lab smart classroom might be. But I'm even more concerned about a smart classroom having too little technology than too much, though both are a problem. Many universities are putting a projector or two in a classroom and declaring the creation of electronic classrooms, multimedia classrooms and, of course, smart classrooms. While there are many solutions that minimize budgets, we need to look at how to maximize learning. That takes not only hardware, but also good learning spaces to start with, good design and equipment that regular faculty can learn to use effectively. Some control panels for smart classrooms appear to be capable of controlling a nuclear power plant. Under those circumstances, faculty are as likely to get their PowerPoint slides displayed as they are to avert a nuclear meltdown. Even with the best-designed smart classroom, universities are faced with a field of dreams dilemma. If we build smart classrooms, will faculty come and do great things there? How can a professor who has just discovered colored chalk and e-mail create a multimedia lecture worthy of a smart classroom? Who wouldn't want a classroom that makes learning better? Students demand it, faculty would like students who are more enthusiastic and who learn more. The administration knows that prospective students and returning alums expect them. All we have to do is design them, fund them, build them and support them, each of which is a formidable task. Tech Talk, as you may know, uses fairly simple technology. Judith, Malcolm andI may sound like we're in the same room, but in fact our only connection is common analog phone lines. But from our passive chairs, in front of our Luddite desks in our low-IQ offices, we will attempt to shine some digital interactive multimedia laser light on smart classrooms on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Thank you, Howard, and I'm trying to envision what a smart chair would look like.
HS: Go to the Media Lab, the MIT's Media Lab site and you won't believe it!
JB: All right, great. Thank you for that introduction and I would just like to add the comment that while we're talking about smart classrooms today, we are really going to be talking about the physical space that we're talking about, but I think we'll gradually kind of evolve into talking about what the smart classroom might be when we are talking about virtual space, too, so we've got a lot to talk about today. So with that, let me welcome our expert for today, Malcolm Brown. Malcolm is the Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. He is an active author and presenter on information technology issues in higher education. Most pertinent for today, he's been Chair of Dartmouth's Subcommittee on Classroom Development and Utilization since its beginning in 1993 and during that time now, Malcolm has been involved with over 20 smart classroom renovation projects and the development of a dozen or so new classrooms. He's also been conducting a survey of leading higher education institutions on the deployment of technology in classrooms, and we'll ask Malcolm a lot about this survey when we talk in today's session. Welcome to Tech Talks, Malcolm.
MB: Thank you very much! Thanks for having me!
HS: Malcolm, maybe you could tell us your view of what a smart classroom is. What does it take to turn a regular classroom into something that's a smart classroom?
MB: Well, before I speak directly to that question, the one thing that I would want to mention is that this label of "smart" for the classroom is something I think we'll need some conversation about because I'm not sure in many cases how appropriate a label that is. But having said that, a smart classroom, I think-based particularly on the information I've received via my survey-is a teaching space that supports a variety of things. One is old-fashioned lecture presentation, what some schools are now calling Chalk and Talk. It also supports the presentation of analog and digital media. It also supports the presentation of three-dimensional objects via document cameras. It also supports interweaving of all these types of media into a single presentation and the components, the hardware components at the least, are controlled by some central system such as an AMX or a Questron system.
HS: Okay, that was sort of a broad overview, but when it comes down to it, what things do we need? Do we need VCR's, DVD players? We're going to build one of these things, we have a shopping list. What's going to be on it?
MB: Well, I think what's going to be on it is an installed projector in the room connected to a variety of input sources, a multi-format VCR certainly is still required. Certainly a computer is required with, obviously, a network connection or two. The other parts get to be optional, depending on how you look at it and how you define what your classroom is about. You could have DVD players, you could have CD players as well as your computer. There are a variety of things once you venture off in this direction. Different schools have different ideas as to what is essential in the room.
HS: You said there's a computer in the room. Did you mean that? Do we have a computer in the room or do faculty members and other people doing presentations bring their own or do we do both?
MB: Do both. Based on the input that I've gotten in my survey, almost all the schools are putting some computer in the podiums in these rooms. There are a few, I think University of Chicago is one of them, that does not, that expects the faculty member to bring their laptop with them. And most of these podiums have plugs so that you can bring your own laptop in and plug in your own laptop as well, so it's sort of giving you both, both the house computer as well as facility for hooking up a laptop.
HS: Could you just talk for a couple minutes about the pros and cons of having somebody bring their computer vs. not?
MB: Well, the nice thing about having it in the podium is that it's there so even when your event's in the evening, for example, when you have a guest coming in from, say, some other institution giving a one-time lecture or talk, they have something that's in the podium. Your service staff that may have gone home at 5:00 to be with their families don't have to be there, things like that. On the downside is that when there's one computer in the podium, it's possible for Professor A to mess things up that Professor B was counting on having when he or she arrived to actually give their course. That can happen. That of course is addressed that as you bring in your own laptop, then you don't have that kind of collision problem happening. I think nowadays, I detect a tendency to begin to encourage folks more and more to bring their own laptops simply because they have all their resources, everything's laid out exactly the way they're expecting it to be and there are fewer glitches that way.
HS: What about facilities for students? In this smart classroom, you now talked about the stuff we need for the professor to come out and project all kinds of stuff. What about students having their computers in a smart classroom?
MB: Well, I think with the advent of wireless and wireless really sort of coming on its own as it has, I think there's going to be a great surge in that type of access or that type of facility for the students who are in the audience. Before, when thought about providing Internet access for each student seat, you had in a 300 seat auditorium, that's a lot of ports, a lot of AC ports to provide and oftentimes was cost prohibitive. But now with wireless being there, it's much more viable. Current practice is, I think, we're just beginning to see its introduction into the classrooms. A lot of schools identified it as a so-called advanced technology they're bringing in to experiment with.
HS: Okay, so you're saying it's something that would be optional. We could do that or-�
MB: Oh, very much so, depending again on the pedagogical model. I mean, I've had conversations-I imagine most of the audience has-with faculty members who simply do not want that sort of access because they think it will be distracting. As a matter of fact, I've heard some people have conversations where the faculty members want to have a switch to turn off Internet access in the classroom because they just don't want students being distracted or reading e-mail and playing games while they're trying to conduct a class. It's kind of a double-edged thing, and I think as with many things, there's a lot of human factors wrapped up in all this as well.
HS: Could we talk about human factors just for a bit? If we put all this equipment in, the VCR's and all the analog and digital stuff and DVD players and you name it, as I said in my intro, you could wind up with a control panel that looks like it controls a nuclear reactor.
MB: Absolutely.
HS: How do you make it so that it doesn't look like a nuclear reactor and how do you make it so that faculty can use this stuff?
MB: Right now, that's still, I think, a bit of a challenge. Even a room that has something like an AMX or a Questron control panel, if you haven't used the room before and know just how the panel works, it can be somewhat of an intimidating experience to be standing up there, particularly if it's two minutes to showtime, you have a sea of expectant faces looking at you and then you have to navigate this control panel. Ah, but see, if you've practiced a little bit ahead of time, you can alleviate some of that anxiety, but still, it is, I think a point of challenge that even with these control panels it can be a bit of a challenge to navigate your way to have-particularly with all the range of things you can now put on the screen, from the document camera to the computer to the tape and back again.
JB: Do most faculty get assigned to the same room fairly predictably, Malcolm? Does that start to address that problem a little bit?
MB: That can address it to some extent, certainly, and most schools are doing what we're doing here at Dartmouth which is as much as possible to try and make that podium, that command post if you will, look the same from classroom to classroom. So if you go from classroom A to B to C, there's enough of a familial resemblance there so that you can find your way pretty much without too much problem. Sometimes it's a problem if you're grafting technology on a classroom that was designed a hundred years ago before the architects even dreamed this stuff was going to be possible, it can be a challenge getting the technology effectively into that teaching space.
JB: I know we'll probably talk about costs a little bit further down the pike, but are there ranges of those costs for the AMX and the Questron systems that are predictable?
MB: The costs, I think, are fairly predictable, again depending on the scope of-when you go into a classroom, you have to decide what the scope of the project is. Is it just a technology treatment or are you going to go in and renovate the physical aspects as well? Are you going to address some of the-there might be issues with the space, for example. There might be HVAC issues with the space that need to be addressed. So you have a variety of renovation choices you need to make and that will obviously determine the cost. The costs will run anywhere from $25,000-which I think would be the minimum for a minimum technology treatment-anywhere up to half a million to a million dollars, depending on what you run into. We've had projects that ran into lots of abatement problems and that drives the cost up as well.
JB: Okay.
HS: What about, we're talking about these smart classrooms but what about smart things that aren't quite classrooms, like smart labs and when you're talking about these smart classrooms, it sounds like you're talking about big lecture halls. But what about smart classrooms that are kind of small? Do we do something different in these different spaces along these lines?
MB: Well, yes, you would obviously need to address what you're doing with the technology depending on the type of teaching and learning that goes on. In a lab, for example, you probably want to rig up systems that can make the whole thing digital. That is, you gather data, your measurement devices are inputting in some sort of digital format. You can do that directly into handhelds for example, and you can pass that dataset right on to a computer if need be and process the data, not only efficiently and quickly, but without any errors or loss of information. So yeah, there are a lot of different things you can do, depending again on what type of teaching is happening in the space.
HS: Okay, we've gotten a couple of questions, actually, which are the same question about-now that we're talking about all this equipment-about how in the world do we secure this equipment? How do we make sure that somebody doesn't steal it or damage it?
MB: It is, that's a problem, particularly if you start getting into smaller devices, I don't know, like handhelds or other sorts of instrumentation.
HS: But even one of these big control panels with all the VCR's and all that kind of stuff.
MB: Yeah, at the most recent EDUCAUSE I was talking to someone who was having that problem. They're having to encase their built in projectors in cages and fasten the cages to the ceiling to prevent theft. Sometimes you'll have to lock things up, you have to perhaps within the podium itself to secure things using cables or some such. It is an issue and it's unfortunate because it complicates. I mean, the projects are already complicated enough and this just complicates it further.
HS: Don't you also have to secure the room itself? Because if somebody got in there, they'd use the equipment and they might use it in a way that abuses it.
MB: Yep. Usually, like here, we have Safety and Security come around after a certain time in the evening and they'll just lock the room up. So yes, you have to worry about people coming in after hours, people coming in before hours, just using the equipment or actually trying to steal the equipment.
HS: Judith, just before, asked about whether professors keep going into the same room and things but I have sort of a related questions. It seems like most places-and if this is not true at Dartmouth, fuss with me-but most places have a few smart classrooms, not every classroom is smart. And doesn't that mean we have like lots of people trying to schedule into those things?
MB: Yeah, utilization is actually an interesting issue that arises once you begin to introduce technology on any sort of large scale basis into your classroom. So the registrar now has an additional dilemma on his or her hands. Does he or she schedule a class into a room because they might use the technology once or twice but the size is off or what? So yes, when you have technology, particularly in the early stages of technology plan for your classroom, you do have issues in utilization and oftentimes there are not very good answers for that. So there are only a few resources or rooms that are treated on campus. The question is, what class-who gets it and who doesn't? That's what it comes down to.
HS: But I mean, do you find that what's happening is that somebody will say, "I'm teaching, whatever, Econ 401 and I get it for all my lectures," or are people saying, it's more like, "The third lecture I'm giving, I really need the smart classroom"? Are people doing parts of their courses?
MB: As far as I can tell and through the information I've gotten, most schools are doing a fairly traditional scheduling routine. Okay, you're doing Econ 3, you have Hall Room Number 7 for the whole term, whether you're using the technology once, twice or every day.
HS: Yeah, because I mean, you said the classrooms also have to support the talk and chalk kind of things so somebody could be coming in there and saying, "For this lecture, it's going to be mostly talk and chalk but I'll still tie up this equipment."
MB: Um-hum.
HS: Should universities be going to a point where we say there's a certain minimal amount of smartness beyond the blackboard that should be in every classroom? Is that what we should be doing?
MB: I think that's exactly the way things are headed. I mean, going back again to the information I've gotten in terms of surveying the rooms. I was surprised at how widespread or how commonplace it was to have rooms treated to some extent with technology in classrooms at the various schools that I queried. Research schools, for example, I was just counting now the smart classrooms, that is, rooms that have all the gear plus some sort of control panel. And they were saying that they had 44% of the rooms treated that way.
HS: Oh!
JB: Wow, that's [inaudible].
MB: The liberal arts schools-again, I was just doing a quick tally here-they say they have, their average was 45% of their rooms have received some sort of treatment.
JB: Um-hum.
MB: As I said, the research was about 45. Community colleges, about 30%. So I think, given the complexity of these projects, that is going and treating these rooms, and the cost scale, I think this marks pretty good progress.
HS: I'm sorry. You keep bumping into the survey. Maybe you could tell us about what you did and how things worked out.
MB: Well, what I did was-what got me going down this path was an invitation to lead a discussion at SAC last August-�
HS: And you had no data.
MB: And I had no data and I said, "Well, gee, this is going to be an open discussion on classrooms. It would be good to have a little data there just to kind of get things launched so what I first did was an informal query of the Ivy Plus group in terms of what they were doing. And once that came and went, it seemed like it would be very useful to have lots more information, just as a way of comparing things, kind of taking a snapshot of what common or current practice is. So I came up with a roster of about seven, eight questions and mailed it off to about 150 schools and collected responses from about 65 of them and I divided the schools into three different categories. Community colleges, liberal arts colleges and research universities.
HS: And you're going to tell us-I mean, if you could tell us briefly the results that you got.
MB: Well, the first question, I led off with kind of a free association one. Just tell me what are your three key issues and really not saying much more than that. And here there was a lot of agreement. Not surprisingly, the factor that everyone agreed was a big problem was cost. The second one may be a little bit surprising, but again, there was agreement. Each of the categories agreed that cost and faculty training were two issues that they were really wrestling with. And there was agreement across the three groups. I found that rather interesting.
JB: That is interesting!
MB: The other one that figured high in the liberal arts institutions and the research institutions was the classroom design, that is, trying-this goes back, Howard, to a question you had before. How do we design a classroom with all this gear in it, with all these options, in a way that mere mortals can actually navigate successfully?
HS: Yeah.
MB: So it's not surprising that that remains-that was identified as a key concern for most schools. The other one that kept coming up was staffing. That is to say, you create a large, rather far-flung geographically infrastructure about the room, about this stuff. How do you support it, how do you bail out maybe five professors who are having problems in their rooms all at ten a.m. on Tuesday morning?
HS: I mean, are people who are doing these smart classrooms, are most of them running it so that the faculty member just goes on to this classroom and does not have anybody from any kind of support service show up to help them?
MB: I think that is largely the case. I think in the majority of instances, there is no problem with this stuff. But given that teaching a class is kind of a performance that's got to start at 10:00, if you're having problems, then you need someone from the support team to come and help you get going again.
HS: So you solve the problem just by having someone near a telephone who can get dispatched?
MB: A lot of schools do that. In fact, I talked to one school that actually hires a set of students and they sit in the large lecture halls just in case something goes wrong. And if something goes wrong, they pop out of the audience, run up and get the professor going again and go back and take their seats, which I thought was a rather interesting way of providing the kind of support-�
HS: These are students that are not taking the course.
MB: Now, they're doing their own course work. I mean, they're not taking this course. They're just sitting there in case something goes wrong.
HS: So it's a student job, actually.
MB: So in some cases it's a student job because a lot of things are just kind of basic. I mean, if you know how the technology works, it's rather basic.
HS: Okay, going through the survey?
MB: I'm sorry, Howard?
HS: Continuing on the survey.
MB: Okay. The other question was, do you have tiers? That is to say, do you try to categorize the amount of technology in your room by having some sort of tiered approach and most of them do have tiers, although across the survey about 67% do some sort of tier classification of their classrooms. About a third do not.
HS: And by this you mean different kinds of smart classroom, classrooms with different IQ's?
MB: Yes. Well, yes, in a way. Although again, I somewhat contest the label of smart for the classroom, but yes, that'd be like for example there might be one type that you might call ready for media. That is one that basically does chalk and talk, supports along with the network ports so you could bring in a computer and projector, set it up very quickly and then do some media viewing in that way. Another tier that's often identified is a step up from that that has all of the above plus it adds the built in computer, projector, support for displaying old and new media, document camera, things like that. And then a third level might be something like all the above that's controlled by some sort of Questron or AMX controller to control the componentry. Then you come to variations on the smart classroom, I call it. One is what you might call a computer classroom. We call them here at Dartmouth Instructional Centers and that's the room that has a computer at each student seat.
JB: So that's almost like a lab then, in other words.
MB: That's almost like a lab.
HS: Except it's really designed for instruction, not for students just to wander in and work.
MB: Right. It's designed for instruction and what people call this varies a lot. The most common name for it I've found was computer classroom and finally, another variation is the classroom that supports some kind of videoconferencing, either using traditional ISDN lines or H323 or perhaps even the Axis Grid Internet 2 MBONE source of technology.
HS: To bring up videoconferencing [inaudible], another interesting question is if you do put together these smart classrooms, it seems like you could justify the cost a bit better or a bit easier if you could use them for lots of other things, other than just classrooms. Are people doing that? I mean, videoconferencing, for example, is something that's probably going to be used very much by the staff and faculty for getting people together.
MB: I'm sure that the institutions are using their classrooms not only just for classes but for what you might call events, that is, lectures, conferences, things like that. Whether they're actually trying to recover costs by charging usage fees for these sorts of things, I'm not sure. I mean, if you were using H323 which used a standard IP, you would need to charge anyone for that, that's a good question. I don't think anyone's trying to get rich off these classrooms.
HS: No, my point just was if you come along and you say it's going to cost a zillion dollars to build a smart classroom and it's just going to be used as a classroom, it might be easier to justify if you say it's also going to be used as a videoconferencing facility and other things.
MB: Oh, absolutely.
HS: So it looks like you're getting more for your money.
JB: In terms of the tiers and levels of the classroom, Malcolm, it sounds as if the survey helped you to identify perhaps some trends there. I think in terms of the videoconferencing classroom, would it be safe to say that that's a trend that's coming in?
MB: Oh, yes. Yes. Again, this is technology that kind of like wireless is coalescing and getting to the point where there are some solutions that are fairly reliable and robust. One of the things that I detected-and it makes sense-is one of the questions I asked was what are you doing in your classrooms that you might call advanced? Are you experimenting or using any type of what you might call advanced technology in your classrooms? And one reply I got that surprised me, but when I thought about it made all kinds of sense, is that some schools said, "Absolutely not! We are not because these teaching spaces have to be reliable. We can't have some sort of newfangled technology that's somewhat flaky or suffers from latency or has other things associated with it that will detract from or damage, say, the teaching experience that needs to happen in that room." So in terms of rolling out stuff that's advanced, of course, advanced is a relative term. What's advanced at one place may not be considered advanced at another. There's some conservatism about what type of technology you put into a larger classroom simply because it has to be reliable and you have to make sure that your users-in this case, mostly the faculty-can stay with you. As you put lots of new gear in it, you will just bewilder the faculty, saying, "Where did this come from? I came in here last week, it looked this way. I come here this week and it's got these new things in here. Now I'm confused by it."
JB: In fact, I want to go back to when we talked about videoconferencing coming in as a trend. We are talking about videoconferencing over the network as opposed to the analog solution.
MB: Yes.
JB: Okay. Just another question on the trends. There was, in terms of serving classrooms and bringing technology into the classrooms by virtue of mobile carts, that seemed to be always kind of a smart thing to do but is that gaining favor or losing favor right now?
MB: I know some schools have kind of classrooms on carts that can wheel in. You might have like a dozen laptops or something, you can hand them out and you have sort of an instant classroom. We have one of them here at Dartmouth and it's used some, though not a lot. Again, the more widespread you have your classrooms treated with technology, I think the less demand there will be for that. But that's useful if you have, like a floor, for example, has three or four rooms and at any one time, you might need some sort of smart technology in one of those rooms so you just run the cart down there and bingo, you're set and ready to go. So for a space that-a contiguous space that might have three or four classrooms that could use that cart kind of on a rotating basis, then that absolutely makes sense.
JB: Maybe your answer to that question leads us into one of the questions that's being asked by Ed Goray from University of Illinois Chicago. He had a couple of questions about laptops in the classroom and he asks the question about who provides the cables to hook up to the laptops, and I think that's assuming that the students are bringing their own in. Maybe we could stop there and answer that question.
MB: I think we assume that the onus is on the laptop's owner to bring any necessary cables, although it was interesting. At our library, the information desk kept getting asked by students before we introduced our wireless network that would forget to bring their Ethernet cables with them and, gee, didn't they have one they could just check out? If you have a program, say you were really trying to get faculty members to bring in their own laptop, you might have ones that they could check out for a term. So those who don't have laptops could check it out from the classroom support people, keep it for a term and use it, and that would include the necessary cables necessary to make the thing rung at the podium. So obviously the tricky thing is the video cable itself and making sure that it's the right gender and the right plug configuration, things like that.
JB: Okay. And then the other question has to do with our institutions providing wireless keyboards and mouse devices for the computers housed in the podium.
MB: Yes. Some are. Some are experimenting with that and they seem to like it a lot. Much better than the infrared keyboards because you don't have to have it necessarily pointed in a particular direction and gives a lot more mobility to the presenter to move about the room. They can take the mouse with them as they walk away from the podium. I'm sure everyone who's given a PowerPoint presentation and found it somewhat aggravating to have to keep walking back to the podium and clicking the mouse button to advance the slides.
HS: Yeah, I have a mouse with a very, very long cord, but it's never long enough.
MB: Never long enough. So the radio controlled input devices are really a boon here.
HS: We have a couple other questions that have come in here. In fact, we have lots of questions, which is really great. We have one from Carol Myers at Emory University. She says, "How do you recommend handling maintenance for smart classrooms in terms of funding replacement cycles?"
MB: Well, there was a lot of comment in the responses I've received in doing my survey about this. A lot of schools will allocate capital funds to do the initial renovation and then sometimes there's the tendency to leave the project a bit high and dry by not making maintenance funds available. We went through that here and came up with a plan with essentially our building and grounds folks to come up with a maintenance plan so we had funds available to service the classrooms and we have ways of increasing those funds as you're bringing more classrooms on board. That is a really thorny issue. You do need to have some sort of funding mechanism so you can update your equipment and replace it when it goes belly up. If you do have computers in your podium, those are things that need to be refreshed at the latest every two years because we know that what you need in the classroom is robust hardware. You need fast networking speeds, you need robust computers, because you need to have these components really fine-tuned in a way that they're responsive and [inaudible] need to go in various directions. So those are some things that need to be refreshed and yes, you need to worry about having a maintenance budget to cover those.
HS: Tom Hand at Virginia Tech asked a question. You may have answered part of it. He says, "What is the life cycle of a smart classroom?" You talked about the computers, but what about the rest of the equipment? How often does that have to be replaced?
MB: Well, some of it will depend. Say the projector. It will depend on-I mean, I think the last jump we made was going from the three-two-the old three-two projector approach which was kind of a pain because you would have to go and converge them from time to time. And so it's an advance to go to an LCD projector that doesn't need to be converged, but then you say okay, what's the native resolution of a projector and if you have ones that are still running that were 684x480 resolution, then you've got to upgrade those because most people will be coming in with expectations of resolution of 800x600, perhaps even greater. So the componentry will vary again, depending on whether it's digitally based or analog based. Obviously, if you have a cassette player in your smart classroom, that probably will not need to be upgraded at all except maybe to be repaired if it breaks. The digital componentry, that depends a little bit on just how rapid the progress is. I mean, we all know how rapid the progress is on the digital front.
HS: Oh, yeah. On another front, both Carol Myers and Ed Goray ask a similar question so I'll just rephrase it into one question. But they're saying, how do you handle special requests for software installations and for special hardware? Software installations on the podium computers and if somebody wants some special piece of equipment in the classroom, how do you deal with that?
MB: That's a good question and it depends on how outrageous or outlandish or unusual the request is.
HS: Of course, they always have [inaudible] completely reasonable [inaudible] faculty member.
JB: There's a whole continuum here, right?
MB: Yeah.
HS: The faculty member always thinks they're completely reasonable and everybody else thinks they're outlandish.
MB: If it's a software application, a lot of schools are using things like Assimilator, Ghost, LANQuest PowerQuest to control the content of the classroom computers. That is to say, they're imaged or the contents are generated by some central server and sent out so if someone wants to add, say, I don't know, [inaudible] Data because they're going to be using it in their classroom, it's fairly easy to add that application to the classroom computer and update them over the network that way. So that's a pretty good device for doing that. If it's a piece of hardware like, I don't know, some tablet or something like that, generally that's where the classroom support people come in. If it's not too outrageous a request-here, we try to do as much as we can to accommodate the faculty and their special requests. You acquire the device if it's not out of the question and then you just look for a way to install it. That may not be a very helpful answer. It's kind of hard abstractly to say exactly in each case how you go about it because it does depend a lot on what type of hardware it is, how easy or hard it is to insert it into the mix of technology that's in the classroom, things like that.
HS: Who determines what that's going to be, in terms of the university committees, policy, whatever? I mean, who says, "This is the set of equipment that's going to be in these different smart classrooms"?
MB: Yeah, that was actually one of the questions I asked on my survey, the question being, who controls this anyway? Is it by some single Classroom Tsar or is it some sort of committee? And most institutions responded by saying it's some sort of mixed committee. That is to say, you have input from the building and grounds folks, you have input from the Dean's office, from the Registrar's office, from the IT folks. And there can be other folks on that committee as well. And then you work with your faculty. Then you see what the faculty are asking for and you try to meet as much of that need as you can. When we undertake a project here, we're always very careful to make sure that we solicit input from the faculty members, particularly the ones who are likely to be using the room a lot, to understand what their needs are and to address them as best we can. For example, the folks in our math department still like to have lots of chalk space. They still do lots of equation writing on the board and they need lots of chalk space. So as we're going into our classroom projects in a new math building, we're taking that into account.
JB: Okay, there's another question coming in from Victor Aleschia from UMBC and he's actually had a couple of comments, but this third question is "What is the ratio of professional technical staff and the number of media classrooms?" And I'm thinking of this particularly, Malcolm, when we start talking about having classrooms and the number of classrooms, anywhere from 30 to 40 to 50% of the classrooms. What kind of technical staff is required to support this?
MB: That's an excellent question. It's such a good question, I wish I included it on my survey to try to see what people are thinking in this area.
JB: So we have the beginnings of a new survey here?
MB: Absolutely! That's a great question. Early on, we were thinking here at Dartmouth that maybe one technician per eight or nine classrooms. I think that's a little bit rich for the mixture in the sense that that's a lot of support staff. The liberal arts schools, for example, they seem to come in having classroom pools of having like 80 to 120 classrooms, something in that range typically. So if you treated half of those classrooms as technology, then you have a pool of 40 to 60 classrooms that you have to worry about. That might be, six technicians to do those might be a little bit rich for the mixture. That is to say, that might break the bank a bit. I'm not sure what the ideal ratio there is. A lot of it would depend on, again, just how experimental the equipment is, how rock-solid it is. That's another argument, I think, not to rock the boat too much. That is, if you put lots of newfangled gear into it, you might create a monster that takes lots of extra support cycles. That's a good question and I don't have a good answer for it at the moment.
JB: Well, you did mention before, maybe part of the answer too is that popular mix of full-time staff and some student staff, so when you do your survey next, we'll have to include that.
MB: Right. You can leverage some student help by having them take on, say, a lot of the routine or preventative maintenance in your classrooms. That is to say, you might have someone once a week check the classroom computer or the componentry, go in there, turn everything on, make sure it's working, look to see if anything is out of order, make notes if it is or repair it or sort of re-ghost or re-image the computer so that it's up-to-date and has all the latest stuff on it. There's a lot of preventative stuff that you can do and that's fairly routine stuff and student help is great for that.
JB: Okay, let me just remind our listeners that the questions are coming in, but I'm sure you might have one of your own and to send it to expert@cren.net. Howard, do you have a couple? I'm sure you must have three or four questions waiting for you here.
HS: Oh, yeah, and in fact there's a bunch sitting here. I actually thought you were going to say something else, though.
JB: Oh, you did?
HS: Yeah, I did.
JB: Oh, you thought I was going to announce the winner of the Palm Handheld?
HS: I thought you were going to announce the winner of that thing! I was just trying to-I mean, normally I wouldn't give you any air time at all, Judith, but-�
JB: I know that! That's why I was just pausing here.
HS: That's why you were jumping in!
JB: Yes, and at the risk-�
HS: So you're going to do this right now.
JB: At the risk of interrupting this, yes. We have a winner for the Palm Handheld that we had the drawing for two weeks ago, and the winner is Mario Waddell from Eli Lilly and Mario, if you're listening in the audience, if you would send us an e-mail telling us what you do there and what you're going to do with that, that would be great! But even without that, we'll send it to you!
HS: No, we'll give it to Malcolm.
JB: We'll give it to Malcolm? All right, there you go.
HS: [inaudible]�
JB: Okay.
HS: Right. Malcolm, when people are putting a computer in the podium, Ed Goray wants to know, are people putting a PC and a Mac there, or just PC's, or what are you doing?
MB: Oh, that's a question that can incite religious wars, I'm afraid! Well, you have this choice-�
HS: Did people on your survey say anything about that or do people you know say anything about that?
MB: That didn't come up. I have the impression that things are so PC that it's almost always a Windows device. Maybe here at Dartmouth because we're one of the last holdouts for the Macintosh, although that's changing, that it's at all a question as to what sort of system you put in there. We right now are putting just one CPU in each podium and it's a Macintosh. But there's so much increased use of Windows here at this campus that it's actually becoming now a hot topic as to what we do. You could say, well, gee, just put both in and have them share the same keyboard, use one of these switching systems so that they can share the same monitor, same keyboard, same mouse. That is fine, except that what you don't want to do is to make your podium such a behemoth sized piece of furniture that it actually sort of becomes a bunker behind which the lecturer or the instructor hides. You want to keep it as small as possible so that it encourages interaction between faculty and students. So if you put in two CPU's, that might get to be a little bit big. You can cut through this Gordian knot entirely by saying, "Just bring your laptop" and doing it that way. That kind of cuts through, it bypasses the whole question.
JB: That's a really good question or good strategy, I would think, Malcolm, just not putting PC's in the classroom at all. Is that starting to be a trend that you see in your survey?
MB: Again, that's something that I think [inaudible] but starting to take hold. A lot of it will depend on the institution's culture, specifically the faculty culture as to how palatable, so to speak, that approach might be. I wouldn't dream of by tomorrow going out to the Dartmouth green and saying to the faculty, "We're taking all the computers out of the podiums, get a laptop and have a good day." So that's sort of an approach that obviously wouldn't work. You would need to sort of gradually phase in something so that everybody had sort of equal access to the resources in the classroom. Again, it depends a lot on the campus culture.
HS: Talking about the campus culture, do most of your faculty at Dartmouth have laptops? Do any of them?
MB: A lot of them do. I wouldn't [inaudible] to say just what percentage. I know the students certainly do. I think we've all seen this, that our incoming class, over 70% bought laptops this year and I was surprised that only 70% did. So we're seeing a great increase there and I think more and more, the faculty are getting onto the laptop bandwagon so that's a rather slow evolutionary process.
HS: Do we need a program to encourage faculty to get laptops?
MB: I think so.
HS: You could say, "It's something you need to teach."
MB: I rather agree. Given how dependable the laptops have become and how fully featured they've become, there seems to be no real reason to say you can't use a laptop for everything you need to do, including teaching in the smart classrooms. This is something I plan to begin working with our Deans here to look for ways to encourage faculty or get them to think about, at their next acquisition, to get a laptop.
HS: One of your survey questions was, what percentage of your overall classroom pool have received the technology treatment? What was the results of that?
MB: Well, let's see. Actually, again, the results somewhat surprised me. The percent of rooms that have-again, here, while I was looking at the responses I was counting the ones, the room that sort of had permanent treatment-that is, that had particularly a projector, installed, wired to the wall or ceiling in the room. And I was just using that kind of on the fly as the criteria to judge whether that room was in or out. And based on the responses I got, the liberal arts community had an average of 45% of the rooms had this type of treatment. That usually meant, as I said, at least a projector installed as well as a computer installed in the room. The research institutions were almost the exact same percentage. The average turned out to be about 44%. The community colleges were a little bit under that. They were at 30%. But that surprised me. Again, we're not talking about rooms that you could bring the equipment into on a setup-breakdown basis, but this is permanently installed. It's getting close to half the rooms, significant penetration. Again, in light of the cost and complexities of these projects, I think that's amazing progress.
HS: Where is the force or the push, who's demanding that we have smart classrooms? Where's that need coming from? Faculty, staff, students?
MB: If Dartmouth is any indication or typical, it's coming from both. It's really been amazing to me, watching the demand for smart classrooms take off here at Dartmouth. Now we couldn't think of doing any type of classroom project, whether build from scratch or renovate, and not make it a smart classroom. It's just almost now it's just almost understood that yes, this classroom will be a smart classroom, and the Registrar cannot keep up with the demand for the technology s it's just accelerated. From the point of view of the faculty, also I imagine the students are asking, "Can we see this onscreen or that onscreen?" and things like that. So I think both those communities are articulating the desirability of this type of treatment.
JB: In the responses that you got from the survey, Malcolm, what about the well-articulated trend towards a focus on student learning rather than teaching and kind of a trend towards collaborative learning? Did you see any indication of what kind of a classroom might be smart and really supportive of that kind of learning strategy?
MB: Well, I didn't see a lot of mention of that in the survey. Most of my questions were somewhat slanted to the more, what we might call a more traditional teaching space, simply because it seemed to me that that was still-that these institutions are sort of betting with their purse on where they think their core mission is still transpiring, which is not to say that collaborative learning is out at all but these schools are investing lots of money in traditional teaching spaces and it seems to be that face-to-face in classrooms still has-the schools are very much still strongly committed to that type of teaching. Collaborative spaces are beginning to emerge, particularly with lots of synchronous technology. I think as wireless really gets rolling, that's going to be the breakthrough at that point because you sort of no longer need to be plugged into a data port, obviously. At any point, you can just pop open your laptop or handheld and take off with that. I think it's still, for most schools, the wireless coverage is still somewhat sketchy and they're somewhat piecemeal so it's not quite there yet to support that sort of universal synchronicity. But I didn't see much of this discussion in my survey and it may have been due just to the way that I phrased my questions.
HS: We have a question from Dave Hoffman and it's a very specific question, but there may be other people struggling with this, too. He says, "Are you familiar with Questron's eControl system?" He says, "We're in the process of integrating this remote access control system. Do you have any tips? Is there anything we should know?"
MB: Wish I had tips! I don't myself have any experience directly with the type of control system. I know the other manufacturers-�
HS: What is it, for the folks who've never heard what this thing-and I never have-what is this thing?
MB: Well, Questron is one vendor, AMX is another. These are the folks who make these hardware controllers. You have a touch panel in the smart classroom and they link a lot of the hardware gadgetry together and allow you to use it in kind of an orchestrated fashion, if you will, so if you say, "I want to show something on the screen, from the computer screen projected to the front," you push one button. It dims the lights, makes the lights appropriate, switches the input from the project from some other device to the computer on your way.
HS: Sounds great!
MB: Now, what these new gizmos can do is that they allow you to watch, observe the way your room is operating from a central location. It used to be, if something was going wrong, to understand what was going wrong you had to have your support person leave their office, go to the smart classroom, step up to the podium and tinker with this stuff and say, "Okay, this is not correct or this is the way you do it," things like that. Now, these new systems, you're able to do some of that from a central location. That is, you can see what is going on and do some of the troubleshooting from a remote location, which I think will address a lot of support issues. At least has the potential to, certainly. I myself haven't tried certainly to install or fiddle with any of the stuff so I don't have any tips at this point, other than it seems to be a type of technology that has lots of people's attention.
HS: Whenever we've said "smart classroom" in this whole webcast, you've expressed a little concern about the word "smart" being the perfectly appropriate word here. What about the word "classroom"? If we're going to apply this technology to some learning space or whatever, do you think classrooms are going to change as a result of this? Are we going to get away from this four walls, person standing in front kind of thing?
MB: Oh, that's a good question! That's sort of like predicting where the stock market is going to be in three years! One of the things that always impressed me-�
HS: Not where it is!
JB: Right. Hopefully not.
MB: But one of the things that impressed me that-remember way back during the dot-com gold rush, there was a lot of talk about-in fact, I remember there was this one statement made in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that the future of higher education is going to lie outside the classroom, saying that our institutions are going to change. It's all going to be virtual and things like that. Well, that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. As a matter of fact, as I said, a lot of these institutions are putting all sorts of fiscal resources and support resources into renovating these teaching spaces and most of them are supporting face-to-face interactions, augmented by all this technology, but still it's a face-to-face interaction. So I think most of these schools are betting with their purse strings that this is going to remain at the core of what they're doing.
HS: But if we add a camera to the smart classroom so that we can record this thing, we could capture what's going on.
MB: You could capture what's going on, and the neat thing also is to bring in a guest lecturer fairly easily to your classroom using these technologies and the videoconferencing technology, having classes, you know, to facilitate having these classes that go on at two campuses at the same time. Say, one at Dartmouth, one at Rice, something like that. So there are all sorts of ways of expanding the range, I think, of what goes on in these classrooms. Whether we're going to sort of stop doing a lot of face-to-face stuff, I don't see it happening anytime soon. I think reports of the demise of the lecture are greatly exaggerated.
HS: When people are putting in smart classrooms, are they considering or are they having some kind of camera facilities or some way to record the thing? Are a lot of people doing that?
MB: I didn't-some are doing it to some extent. I don't think they're doing it to a large extent.
HS: Why not? Wouldn't it be a good idea to capture these lectures?
MB: I think it would be a good idea.
HS: [inaudible] room that has all this electronic neat stuff in it.
MB: Right. Well, it depends on what you mean, to capture. If you're going to videotape it, it usually means you're going to have to have someone there with a camera who knows how to move the camera from one thing to another to actually tape the presentation. You can use programs like Snagit or Snap Z Pro to record the audio and the screen content so you can play that back, but the question of just how much of the original experience you need to capture for playback in order to be useful for review purposes and things like that for the students. These utility programs like Snagit, things like that, seem to be very, very useful. They can record the audio, they can record what goes on on the screen and create a movie file that you can play back later.
HS: I've used that and that stuff's wonderful.
MB: That can be a great resource as a review tool. The only problem is that they make movie files of fairly large dimensions that can be somewhat ungainly when you're trying to slog them around the network. But nevertheless, it seems to be that that hardly requires adding much on at all. Once you start videotaping, then, you're talking about it's a little bit more expensive because you have to have someone at the camera who knows what they're doing.
HS: Aren't there cameras that just follow people around?
MB: There are, like the PolyCom ones, I think, make cameras like that. I hear mixed opinions as to how good they are. So a lot of it is just how good you think that automatic sort of camera focusing is.
HS: If somebody out there is thinking about building a new building so they don't have to worry about starting with an old classroom, what kind of things should they be thinking about if they want their classrooms to be smart classrooms?
MB: Well, one thing I say is identify the funds for the classrooms and put some guard dogs around it. Particularly what happens is that these building projects are always under-funded and when they start saying, "Where can we cut?" oftentimes the classrooms are the first things to go. And actually, I'm not just being facetious about this. Make sure that there's enough funding in the program that you can actually build the spaces you want to. Other than that, you need to look at the history of what you've done and to look at the program as you have it going. Is it working? Look at the feedback you've gotten from your faculty and your other users for these spaces. Is it working? Is it not working? What are other people doing? How much, how venturesome can you afford to be in these rooms? The one thing that I always thought was an intriguing idea, and I know that some schools have done this like Notre Dame and others, is to build a classroom building, that is, a building that really has no other purpose than just housing classroom spaces. And that seemed to be a very efficient way of trying to move ahead with some of this stuff because it allows you to focus a lot of this technology in a single building so you could have robust networking, you could have servers in the room that just feed the classroom, things like that, so that the technology performs as well as it needs to really support the teaching experience.
JB: It's going to be interesting and maybe some of the people listening could comment on whether having a dedicated classroom building, whether they have found that that's a good approach.
MB: That would be very interesting.
JB: You know, we are very close to running out of time here and we've got-�
HS: And the questions are pouring in now in the last few minutes!
JB: That's right, and so Howard, do you want to pick one last one or two before we have to wrap up.
MB: You just make sure it's an easy one, Howard, okay?
HS: This is an easy one. Actually, I'm choosing ones that I especially want to know the answers to.
JB: Am I surprised?
HS: Actually, it turns out that it's every one I read here, unfortunately, but we have one from Judy Kershner and she's at University of Minnesota at Duluth. Maybe it's springlike up there too. She says, "Any other institutions using online documentation to help faculty become familiar with the classroom technology setting?" And actually, I wonder, if you know someplace that's doing that, maybe we could borrow some of that, Malcolm.
MB: The question is using online documentation.
HS: Yeah, to help faculty become familiar with the smart classroom. They claim they do.
MB: They do, huh?
HS: Yeah, so we should all point our web browsers to Duluth.
MB: No kidding, and they should also respond to my survey questions and put that on the map there. You know, that's interesting. I don't recall of all the responses I've gotten, I don't recall anyone mention that's what they were doing, but it sounds like a great idea.
JB: It does sound like-�
HS: Great idea, Judy, and if you're listening, give us a URL. We'd all like to see it.
JB: That's right.
MB: Yeah, we'll just steal it, sort of shamelessly.
HS: Which is what we do here.
JB: Well, actually that kind of addresses one of the other questions in terms of what kinds of in-service training is provided to faculty to operate equipment and produce presentations. So that certainly, all that kind of documentation on the web would be one way of doing it.
MB: Yeah, that's one way of doing it and I think you have to be kind of unrelenting in terms of trying to help the faculty navigate these rooms because again, we struggle with the design. You try as best you can to have a simplified design that anyone can use, but still it can be somewhat daunting, so you just need to continue to as much as you can offer training experiences for your faculty so they become comfortable using the stuff.
JB: Okay, and I think your word "unrelenting' is probably a good characterization for a support staff. Howard, any other final question?
HS: Yeah, I think the final question here and I think the thing that other folks are wondering about here is if we haven't gotten started yet, how do we get started for a university?
MB: Well, I think the advantage of starting now would be there's a lot of experience and I'm sure if you look to your neighbors in your geographical area, they've been doing something and you can draw on their experience to find out what works and what doesn't. One of the things that did surface was a variety of conferences, publications and websites that people are drawing on to keep informed, to keep on top of things. There are a variety of resources there that you can-and then the other thing to do is start talking to your faculty members, trying to understand where they are with the technology and trying to understand what they want to do or would like to do or could do if they had some technology put into their hands.
JB: Okay. And Malcolm, would you like to make a final invitation to folks to fill out your survey?
MB: Yes!
HS: Or else.
JB: Or else.
MB: Consider, anyone who's listening, if you're at an institution of higher education, particularly if you're at a community college, consider yourself invited. E-mail, I'm Malcolm.brown@dartmouth.edu. I'm happy to send you a copy of the questions.
HS: Are they going to all-�
JB: They're actually all on the-all they have to do is click on a link on the website.
MB: Oh, that's right. So I would invite you there, so it's painless. Only takes an instant. Go ahead and fill it out and send them along to me and I'll put them into my database.
JB: All right, and also a thank you to the three or four folks who have already completed the survey.
HS: Where are the results of that going to be published, Malcolm?
MB: That's actually an interesting question and I'd like to sort of dump this out onto the Internet. However, a lot of the schools said that they responded only on condition that I don't publish their responses. So what I'm going to try to do is to kind of glean the trends and maybe put that on a web page here at Dartmouth. I'm struggling a bit with that. I'd like to just put it out there but some of the schools would rather not have that happen.
JB: Okay, well, with that, we'll look forward to what you can share and with that, it's time for our closing notes. So thanks, everyone, for being with us here today. Be sure to continue blocking off your Thursdays this fall, and particularly for the next topic of Tech Talk on November 29th, which will be-I can't believe this-after Thanksgiving. The important topic that we're going to have is Software Licensing Strategies and Approaches, and our expert will be Bob Calloway from Berkeley. Many thanks to the CREN member institutions and to our sponsor for today's even, Blackboard.com. Blackboard, you will recall, powers e learning and related commerce in the academic marketplace. Many thanks to our Tech Talk expert, Malcolm Brown; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Bonnie Boyles, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, out audio file transcriber and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Enjoy the fall, balmy fall! Bye, Malcolm.
MB: Bye-bye.
JB: Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye, Judith. Bye, Malcolm. This was great fun. Bye-bye.
JB: Bye.
END OF WEBCAST
