Teal is Not the Color of MIT’s Introductory Physics Classroom…
Thanks to some very dedicated staff and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) last week, I and about 40 other attendees of the National
Learning Information Infrastructure (NLII) fall focus workshop on "Learning
Space Design for the 21st Century" enjoyed an intimate tour of more than
a half a dozen of the newer formal learning spaces at MIT.
As my colleague Steve Ehrmann of the TLT Group, who presented to the group
said, first of one space and then of others: "I attended lectures in this
room 30 years ago and it was nothing like this." Steve, an alumnus of MIT,
kept up the refrain throughout the evening. According to Steve, everything looks
the same on the outside (except the Stata Center, see below), but the insides
of the classrooms have been transformed. I was impressed. Can I please go back
to school?
At MIT, like on many modern campuses, the architectural and landscape heritage
is mostly preserved--which sustains the campus brand, image, and feel. Yet the
core mission of the campus--the learning and research that g'es on--is supported
to the utmost by appropriately-designed interior learning spaces enhanced with
current technologies.
There is a little bit of exterior change, though. The juxtaposition of old
and new was nowhere more striking than during our stroll down the street past
the industrial-age architecture of the Wright Brothers' Wind Tunnel
and then into the courtyard in front of what is currently the boldest of new
campus buildings, the playful Stata Center [image above]. I could imagine that some
wild nanotechnology bugs had gotten loose from a lab and was causing campus
buildings to mutate into a strange titanium, brick, and red and yellow enamel
landscape of non-intuitive shapes. Here's
a link to a multimedia tour of the Stata Center.
We visited a set of language learning labs and classrooms, the redesigned "aero-astro"
department (planned from vision to implementation by the nation's "chief
rocket scientist"), a completely adaptable large classroom inside the Stata
Center, and several other formal learning spaces. The dedication of the MIT
staff and faculty showed by taking us on this tour, which took place after regular
working hours, was even more impressive than you might think because this was
at the end of the first day of classes of the academic year.
Of all the interior spaces we saw, I found the classroom for the introductory
physics class, the
TEAL classroom, of the TEAL
(Technology Enabled Active Learning) Project to be the most interesting.
During the semester, the room services 500 students in introductory physics,
never in a group larger than about 100 students at a time. Remember your introductory
physics lectures? You probably sat in rigid rows, too close to other students
for comfort, all facing forward to the sage on the stage who was writing on
endless blackboards with chalk. There'll be no more of that in physics at MIT
for freshmen. Instead, there is the most humane classroom I've ever seen.
This modern MIT studio-style classroom, which is the physical manifestation
of a larger project that completely redesigned the curriculum, is definitely
not a lecture hall. Within its 3,000 square feet nine students sit at each 7-foot
round table. Each group of three students share a networked laptop computer
and below the table, each student can reach into an alcove and grab a handheld
remote device to answer questions from the instructor.
A state-of-the-art instructor's workstation is in the center of the room, but
the physics faculty spend most of their time walking throughout the space utilizing
wireless microphones. It seems like every square inch of wall space is covered
with video screens and whiteboard--one whiteboard specifically dedicated to
each of the students' tables. Ceiling-mounted video cameras are pointed at the
whiteboards, and the images from any one of the cameras can be projected onto
each of the whiteboards at the instructor's command--so student work can be
shared throughout the large space.
A class session g'es like this: The instructor might speak to the entire class
for maybe 10 minutes or so, using the workstation to project video or images
from a digital slideshow or even that old workhorse, the overhead projector.
Then he poses a question to the class and gives an option of, say, five possible
multiple-choice answers. The students reach under the table and each pulls out
a mobile response device and "votes" for the answer of their choice.
The instructor then displays a bar chart of the responses, which usually shows,
the first time around, a wide range of choices made by the students.
Then, rather than indicating which answer is right, the instructor encourages
group discussion during which students explain--perhaps sharing equations or
comments on their table's whiteboard, which is displayed as needed onto all
the whiteboard using the overhead videocams, why they think one or the other
of the answers is correct. After the discussion, the students "vote"
again. The process is repeated as necessary and students end up learning from
the "lecture," the discussions, and from their own thinking as they
watch the bar graph results change until eventually most or all of the class
is voting for the correct answer.
This classroom didn't come cheap, though. The design and renovation of the
3,000 square feet plus the purchase and installation of the technology in it
cost about one million dollars. The coolest thing about it for MIT is, though,
that overall the curriculum design is saving the department money over time.
They've never used teaching assistants, always staffing the introductory course
with faculty members instead, so by eliminating large lectures mixed with smaller
discussion and working sessions, they've significantly reduced the number of
faculty bodies it takes to teach the class.
This new classroom/curriculum gets results. The faculty can statistically demonstrate
that a much higher percentage of students reach benchmarked understanding levels
much more quickly than they had previously done with the old curriculum, using
older technology and a classic lecture hall. The beauty of the TEAL Project
is that the space and the technology in it are well-designed, through good planning,
to serve the collaborative, interactive learning process that the physics curriculum
was rearranged to create. Shouldn't it always be so?
