Live-wired, Flexible Classrooms Energize Teaching and Learning
Minnesota legislators went back to school recently. A dozen campus visitors from the state capitol filed into the classroom of Dr. Maria Gini, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. They sat down with students in Gini’s class on “intelligent agents,” a seminar in high-level software design.
The legislators wanted to know how students liked attending class in this newly designed classroom—a student-centered, flexible, technology-rich environment. Gone was the classroom the visitors might recognize from when they went to college, with its lectern down at the front of the room, rows of desks, and dusty chalkboard. The new 45-seat general purpose classroom in the Electrical Engineering/Computer Science (EE/CSci) building features wireless Internet access, a document camera, two projectors, and round tables at which students can plug in laptop computers to display on adjacent flat-panel wall screens. Lining all four walls are contiguous marker boards made of erasable glass—as convenient to students’ use as to their instructor’s, by design.
The Office of Classroom Management has partnered with the Office of Information Technology to pilot two of these experimental spaces. While the EE/CSci room is the first of its kind on the Twin Cities campus in Minneapolis, it is a smaller mirror of the 117-seat classroom being explored by Robin Wright and her colleagues in the Biological Sciences Center on the campus in St. Paul.
These wired, flexible spaces make room for something different to happen in the classroom—an approach that encourages new forms of teaching and learning, and emphasizes classroom interaction, collaboration, exploration, and peer-to-peer sharing in a media-rich environment. Both Prof. Gini and Prof. Jennifer Gunn, director of undergraduate studies/Program in the History of Medicine, are part of a yearlong pilot project, the Active Learning Classroom (ALC) Initiative, to investigate the ways in which the changed space in EE/CSci 2-260 impacts higher level teaching and learning practice.
Dr. Gini says she has taught this class for many years, but in the new classroom, interactions are much richer. Students themselves take the initiative in leading their peers. After the legislators left, two of Dr. Gini’s students took over the podium and led the classroom discussion of the day, feeding presentations to seven screens while their fellow students at the round tables listened and discussed among themselves. Later, each table presented a reaction to the presentation.
Students in her class have chosen to cluster at the three central round tables, says Gini, where they solve problems in a cooperative way. They use the glass marker boards as a “scrapbook,” a place to share ideas as they discuss class readings. Students this semester have also brought in multimedia, sharing podcasts and videos from Web sites of authors they are reading.
Dr. Gunn, who teaches another class in the room, says the space has completely energized her teaching of Women, Health, and History. On one recent day, her students used laptops to collaboratively create live presentations. Students worked in groups of three, pulling images from the Web to illustrate their themes. “A lot of them were doing collective research to create a presentation, which was the goal,” she says. “I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of Web sites they were looking at.”
Prof. Gunn claims that the openness of the room makes it hard for students to hide—there’s no front row of overachievers and back row of drowsy daydreamers. Not only does it change group dynamics, it also helps students generate a shared understanding of the material together. “You can look at things they’re weighing, how they are processing,” she says. “People get ideas off each other.” Because her students feel respected by the classroom, they bring things to it. “The other day, I had a student who brought a laptop to class. I had bookmarked some sites. She was able to plug in at the table and show all of us,” said Gunn. Furthermore, the room is flexible. A student’s work can fill one or five student screens, for example, while the professor is projecting her laptop on one display screen and writing notes from everyone’s conversation, using the document camera, on the other.
Both professors have requested to teach in the space again. Dr. Gunn says she’s planning more in-class interaction with her WebVista site, and she’d like to capitalize on the room’s enhancements to help students both evaluate the value of historical Web sites and take advantage of new digital databases. Some of them refer to the collaborative work the legislators have been doing. “We can go straight to the Minnesota legislative site and look at the rules for welfare eligibility,” says Gunn. Students may have trouble sorting out which sites are trustworthy. By bringing up the Web, Gunn says she can discuss and underscore the legitimacy of Web sources and their weaknesses. “We can click on the links to show where the limits on the data are.”
The value of the room’s flexible design and technology infrastructure lies in sharing, and offers a model for advanced graduate students like Gini’s, who may go on to teach in such spaces. “The students have gotten pretty good. I’m impressed,” says Gini. “They have learned that just to talk is boring. I see, more and more, they learn how to engage the class. If they become teachers, they will be better teachers.”
