Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/20/05
When you think of what college classrooms might look like a few years into
the future, you probably tend to focus on technology. We imagine wireless devices
all around, the absolute latest interactive technologies, lots of sound and
color, and instant information access from every seat.
But what happens when we talk with real educators who are actually working on
building tomorrow’s classrooms? While technology is important, for many
of them, it’s not the focus. What excites these education visionaries
isn’t necessarily hardware gizmos, hot software, or fatter bandwidth,
although those are important. What energizes them is what happens between and
among students and teachers, both inside the classroom and out—and how
individuals and small groups can use technology to enhance that.
At the University of Washington, a professor is watching what
happens in the classroom when faculty can mark up PowerPoint slides in front
of the group and share student work on the fly. An assistant provost at the
University of Florida is figuring out new ways of ensuring
face-to-face contact in his school’s distance learning programs—whether
delivery is around the state or across oceans. A community relations officer
for Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS believes
her school’s future success lies in the input it receives from the local
business community. And a planner working out of the University of Michigan
envisions a day when partnering among schools will be the norm rather than the
anomaly.
Although each story helps define the classroom of tomorrow, each has at its
foundation an individual or a small team working out the details. And each focuses
ultimately on personal interactions and the learning process—the technology
is merely an enabler.
University of Washington: Archiving Interactions
Richard Anderson, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the campus of tomorrow will
still be recognizable. “I believe the traditional face-to-face classroom
has tremendous staying power... Fifty years from now, the classroom is going
to look quite a bit like it looks today.” He bases that on his belief
that a big part of education involves instructor and student discussion and
interaction—most of it taking place verbally.
Yet, that hasn’t stopped Anderson from envisioning a new form for those
discussions and interactions.
He has spent about three years developing and applying Classroom Presenter,
a presentation tool built on some of the facilities of ConferenceXP, a distributed
classroom platform created by Microsoft. Classroom Presenter, which enhances
PowerPoint, has two types of uses. “One is strictly as a presentation
system, where it’s allowing instructors to incorporate electronic ink
on top of PowerPoint,” says Anderson. Teachers can spontaneously write
on the slides and have the notes appear on the screen. “This is important
in giving instructors additional flexibility in explaining topics—to write
out equations, do quick sketches, write out examples,” he explains.
The other aspect, which is the “long-term direction,” according
to Anderson, is what happens when Classroom Presenter is integrated with student
devices. “The instructor presents slides and writes on slides, but students
have laptops or tablets or other machines receiving the slides and the digital
ink in real time... They get the materials as they’re presented and do
their own annotations.” Then the student annotations can be submitted
back to the instructors.
The application of this, says Anderson, is that the instructor can pose a classroom
exercise on the slide and then have the students do the exercises and send the
results back. In turn, the instructor can quickly go through the responses and
select some of them to display on the screen anonymously. “It gives the
chance to discuss student work,” he says.
To test the method, Anderson worked as a guest lecturer in another instructor’s
class—so they weren’t students he worked with customarily. He arranged
for each student to have a tablet PC at the desktop. Anderson calls it “the
most fun lecture I’ve ever given. The students were incredibly engaged
in the material, not on the device.” He admits that a few students played
and were distracted by the devices, but “by and large, [they] were engaged
in the topic of the class.”
Anderson believes this mode of instruction connected the students in a way
that “just sitting and listening to the instructor drone on” can’t.
As he explains, “It closes the loop for the instructor and allows the
instructor to see how the material is getting across with the students.”
Beyond that, it also changes how the teacher approaches the teaching, he says.
He bases his conclusion on his own experimentation with the system. “The
first thing I had to think about was, what were the students supposed to learn
in this, and then figure out how I would evaluate those learning objectives....
Instead of thinking about how I presented all the details, I was thinking about
what the students were supposed to understand and how I would evaluate this.”
Anderson d'esn’t believe the mode of instruction matches everybody’s
style. “The instructor has to be somebody who can think on his or her
feet.” Also, the exercises shuttling between teacher and students need
to be problems that can be quickly eyeballed by the instructor to make sure
the submissions are worth analyzing by the group publicly.
The role of applications like Classroom Presenter is to make course materials
easier to display and manipulate. “It makes it easier to archive it and
share materials and analyze and display things that people are communicating
and interacting with,” he says. “But there’s still the basic
person-to-person interaction.”
Behind the Scenes: Data Projectors and Networking
On the infrastructure side, Richard Anderson’s application, Classroom
Presenter, assumes the presence of data projectors. Anderson says he’s
been “struck” by how quickly data projectors have become fairly
ubiquitous in the classroom—and how easy they are to connect to instructor
devices. “That’s a mundane but incredibly important detail.”
The other key aspect is network access. Anderson says the system works in wired
and wireless classrooms.
And although tablet PCs have been the target up to now, his long range view
is that it will have to work on a wide range of platforms to succeed—whatever
the students are bringing in, “laptops, tablet PCs, smaller form-factor
devices such as Pocket PCs”—and across different operating systems.
Anderson sees innovation being driven by instructors who are “enthusiastic
about using the technology.” In his vision, campus IT takes a supporting
role, to make sure the software is available on the classroom computers.
University of Florida: Looking Outside the Local Campus
To William Riffee, building the classroom of tomorrow means partnering—both
with educators all over the world and with third-party service providers that
really understand what the solution, technological and otherwise, should look
like.
“When people ask, what is the number one reason for having distance education
program, that is access,” says Riffee, Dean of the College of Pharmacy
and Associate Provost for Distance Continuing and Executive Education at the
University of Florida in Gainesville. “I say, we are allowing around 6,000
people get degrees from the University of Florida—high-quality, top-notch
degrees—[people] who would otherwise not be able to do that. We’re
changing the world one life at a time, because we’ve allowed them to have
access to our programs.”
But imagine a classroom that extends from Florida east across the Atlantic
to Scotland and Germany, west across the Pacific to Korea and Australia and
south to Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. That’s the vision Riffee keeps in mind
as he g'es about his work overseeing the campus’ efforts to globalize
education, which, he says, are intended for “students who can’t,
for whatever reason, come to the United States for residential study, but who
want to participate in a degree program.”
While the presence in foreign countries might simply be considered another
form of distance learning, the University of Florida takes a different approach:
educating the faculty there and using them as support systems for students.
“We don’t want to export the American way of doing things,”
says Riffee. “We spend a lot of time developing relationships with people
primarily in other educational institutions. We believe very strongly in a hybrid
approach to distance education, where we have face-to-face—teachers meeting
with the students periodically.”
The development of these programs is long term. A current initiative underway
in Brazil illustrates the process. “We’re working with the Centro
Universitário de Maringa (Cesumar), a private university center—in
between a community college and a full doctoral university. They’re interested
in our doctor of audiology and doctor of pharmacy programs.” Over the
last couple of years, joint meetings have taken place.
Shortly, the school in Brazil will identify three faculty members in each of
the disciplines to obtain their degrees from UF—under a full UF-funded
scholarship. “They will get their degree at no cost to them, other than
some travel maybe once every couple of years to do some clinical stuff,”
explains Riffee. “Once they get the degree, then we have some built-in
facilitators at those institutions, that will then help us recruit new students
and so forth. We will blend our science with their culture.”
When the program is proposed, the candidates “cry,” says Riffee.
“‘Nobody’s ever come down from the US and said: We are so
interested in working with you that we want to provide this opportunity to you
so you can get a degree and you can help us work with your country to improve
healthcare.’ That’s the bottom line: to improve justice or healthcare
or whatever.”
The hope, Riffee says, is that in three, five, or 10 years, those same instructors
will be building a base of paying students. Of course, to succeed, the pricing
model is different. “Whatever their students would pay for a degree program
there is what they’ll pay for a degree program here. And then we work
out a financial split with that institution. We actually collect the money and
pay the institution back their percentage for their marketing and student support.”
Face-to-face interaction will always play an essential role in education, Riffee
believes. It’s currently being manifested for US-based UF distance students
via Apple’s iChat AV, a full-screen personal video conferencing service
that works over a broadband connection. Groups of students who want to speak
to an instructor set up a meeting time, then sit in their offices or conference
rooms, turn on their computers with the iChat cameras and interact through instant
messenger. “So you have a small group, geographically separated, having
a very intimate interaction in a small classroom,” says Riffee. In the
future, he says that sort of thing won’t have a “Gee, whiz, is this
terrific?” feel to it—it’ll just be standard operating procedure.
Behind the Scenes: Selective Outsourcing
Technology’s role in the University of Florida’s version of distance
learning is to serve up the content, a mix of streaming video, text, animation,
and simulations. “Every technology you’ve seen on the Internet,
we use in our programs,” says Associate Provost William Riffee.
But rather than relying on campus IT to supply specialized services, Riffee
has chosen to work with third-party service providers in many cases. “I
have outsourced where I have felt it was important to get the best quality,
the best turnaround.”
The outsourcing of streaming video was done to obtain 24x7 support. “In
over three years [of operation], we’ve been down a total of two hours,”
he says. “If a student calls one of our IT people, one of our instructors
and says, ‘I’m having trouble with this streaming video,’
within 45 minutes we will know what the problem is—and it’s usually
something in their apartment building. We can trace it back to where they live
and what part of town. I needed that kind of support.”
Riffee has also outsourced marketing and customer service functions. On the
marketing side, Riffee chose a service provider with a propriety system for
tracking students. “Twenty eight to 30 percent of [distance learning]
students took five years to make the decision to enroll in the program, after
first contact,” says Riffee. “[The marketing partner] kept contacting
them and keeping them up to date.”
The same company d'es quality assurance work. Riffee says they’ll call
students and ask how things are going. Then he gets a spreadsheet of results.
“And we say that within 48 hours every problem that has been identified
will be fixed.”
Riffee believes the campus of tomorrow will turn to outsourcing for many of
its non-educational services. “There are companies that are building niches
out there that do a better job than we can do it and end up costing overall
less than it would take for us to build it inside.
Johnson County Community College: Flexibility for Evolving Needs
Susan Lindahl, college and community relations officer for Johnson County Community
College in high-tech hotbed Overland Park, KS, is helping oversee development
of literal “classrooms of tomorrow.” In December 2004, the school
held a “virtual groundbreaking” in which the college president,
board of trustees, and major donors pointed lasers at a giant egg, out of which
emerged robots, which started breaking ground for the new buildings.
What d'es the classroom of tomorrow look like? It is defined by its flexibility.
The Regnier Center for Technology and Business will contain 150,000 square feet
of classrooms, offices and labs, as well as an art museum. It was designed based
on input from a consortium of community leaders, who were asked, according to
Lindahl, “What will be important to you 10 years down the road, 20 years
down the road?”
From there, a committee of school and business participants made site visits
to the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, Virginia Tech, Bellevue
Community College, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their mission
was to ask, “What do you have now? What do you wish you’d put in?
What do you see in the future?”
The result: “Each of the classrooms that we’re putting in will
be multi-purpose,” says Lindahl. “We’re working with a technology
consultant, so we have covered the most advanced technology available—so
that we include wireless capabilities and also every other potential emerging
technology.”
Behind the Scenes: More Hours in IT’s Future
The IT staff will be housed in the new structure, offering a “kind
of walk-up helpdesk, open seven days a week,” she says. The school hopes
to “expand the college’s position as a community resource, by
being open more hours, by providing learning environments in MDI music, 3D
animation, motion graphics, a wet lab for bio tech and bioinformatics courses,
by being a national training site for emerging technologies.”
Lindahl says a key to building the campus of tomorrow is collaboration: a “private/public
partnership.” How better to envision the synergy between technology and
the arts, bio sciences and the community?
University of Michigan: The Rule of Emotions
Building the classroom of tomorrow is something that Phyllis Grummon thinks
about every single day as Director of Planning and Education for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP), affiliated with the School of Education
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her particular area of interest
is change and change management and social capital in organizations. When she
considers the future, it might be six months away, and it might be 20 years
off. She says technology won’t be the driving factor in change, emotions
will.
“Probably since fire, it’s a continual balancing act between advances
in technology—loosely spoken—and the realities of [the] hardwiring
in our brains,” she says. “The more we learn about how the brain
is structured and how learning occurs, the more we realize that emotions are
critical. The effects of change on any organization are pretty readily predictable—because
of that old brain that we have that really triggers our emotional reactions
to what appears to what appears to be a neutral statement.”
As an example, she points to outsourcing. “We outsource the bookstore...
The sacred cow of outsourcing—teaching—has already been broached.
They just haven’t called it outsourcing... When we started the community
college system, colleges and universities were saying, ‘OK, we’re
wiling to outsource the first two years. We’re willing to leave basic
general education to another educational entity.’ Part of where [schools
will] end up going with outsourcing will depend on how much emotional attachment
they perceive their alumnae have with the college or university owning that
function.”
She envisions consortia forming, not just among colleges, but among other entities
too. “A college might partner with a K-12 school district and they might
share technology, or they might share outsourcing in a way that leverages their
power, because now they’re bigger,” she says. “We can’t
really afford to have a program—at a 1,000-person small, private liberal
college—in quantum physics. What agreements are we going to have with
Huge U down the road?”
Behind the Scenes: Sustainability Will Influence Planning
Sustainability will define campuses of the future, just as it affecting them
today. Thirty years of environmental thinking has permeated most students’
consciousness, says SCUP’s Phyllis Grummon. “So you get to college
and you expect that there will be a place to put paper for recycling, that if
you don’t have a bottle return policy, there will be a place next to the
soda machine where you can toss in your empties for recycling.”
Besides the push from students for sustainable practices, environmental compliance
and economic conditions are re-enforcing the tendency to sustainability at schools.
“The Environmental Protection Agency has started regulating campuses,”
Grummon points out. “For many years, they pretty much ignored what went
on on campuses. Now they show up and say things like, ‘This parking garage
is a little too close to the river on campus.’ Or, ‘Oh, this chem
lab has quite a few drums of materials stored in the wrong place.’”
She says more and more campuses are also seeking LEED certification from the
US Green Building Council. Although it’s focused on individual buildings
right now, “the next step is having campus planning and master planning
look at, How do I LEED-certify a campus? How do I look at the water runoff from
a parking in a way that recovers it to be recycled into the cooling of our nuclear
reactor?
Another shift Grummon foresees: “Six years will seem like a short time
to get your bachelor’s degree at some point—because you will work,
go to school, work part time and go to school full time, and just the opposite,”
she says. “We’ll become accustomed to people not really having their
professional credentials until their mid-20s.”
As part of that trend, distance learning will become even more popular because
it can deliver asynchronous learning. “That’s a case where, ‘Ah,
I got scheduled to work this morning. So I’m going to catch my Psych 101
class [online] this afternoon.’ [It’s like saying] ‘I’m
going to Tivo it,’ in essence.”
Grummon d'esn’t expect the concept of the physical campus to go away
anytime in the next century. “Nobody’s going to give up football
games, residence halls—because we’re simply social beings. Students
learn as much from their peers as they do from any professor.”
And massive IT support to sustain the technologies on campus will become less
important. “Certainly, sophisticated scientific equipment will still have
technicians, because there will only be one on campus. But for daily computing,
we’re going to push responsibility to the individual.”
As she explains, “When we have the ability though browsers to communicate
with anybody regardless of the computer platform we have, when you can buy a
Dell computer for $449, perhaps we’ll dispose of ones that don’t
work anymore. Maybe our ISP provider at home or at the university will back
up all our files once a day... so when we’ve had it with [what] we have,
we can junk it. We know we can go out and get a new one and plug it in and our
ISP provider [will have] our shadow disk on it... We’ll just assign bandwidth
to every human being at birth and that’s yours for the rest of your life...
Except for massive terabyte data exchange super computing, every individual
will take care of themselves.”
Through the gyrations of changes in devices, software, approaches to technology,
Grummon hopes the people behind building the classrooms of tomorrow keep one
question in mind: “Particularly when we’re looking at a campus where
the creation, transmission, preservation, and application of knowledge is everybody’s
mission, how do you make sure that the technology d'esn’t drive it but
that the mission drives it?”
Creating the Classroom of Tomorrow Is Happening All Over
Clearly, there’s plenty of fodder for imagining what tomorrow’s
classrooms will look like.
Campuses face a future filled with disparate devices—many mobile and
wireless; lots of connectivity; greater collaboration anywhere, anytime; a growing
population of non-traditional students with different technology needs; traditional
students who expect a greater degree of tech savvy from their schools; a greater
emphasis on distance learning. But as these examples show, tomorrow’s
educators don’t necessarily see technology as the answer. Rather, it’s
only part of the solution.
Along with the hardware and software, the bandwidth and innovation, they’re
focused on the people, the partnering, and experimentation to learn what works.
That serves as a reminder that no matter how technology changes the future,
it remains only part of a learning equation that includes individuals working
together to teach and learn.
