Students reflect on Wallenberg learning experiences

Once every quarter, students who attend classes in Wallenberg Hall are invited to participate in a focus group to discuss their experiences in the Advanced Resource Classrooms. SCIL researchers and teachers who use the facilities are interested in exploring how the technology and set-up of the teaching space impacts learning. The findings and analysis of comments gleaned from these discussions will guide future decisions and plans for Wallenberg Hall, as well as other learning spaces across campus and around the world.

Following are highlights from the March focus group attended by about 20 undergraduate and graduate students representing engineering, English, Greek classics, Hebrew, Computer Science, oceanography and anthropology, among other disciplines.

Webster Digital Whiteboards

• “You can bring up (and display on the Webster screens) video clips, an instant message session, music files or documents. You could bring up things you scratched down in a journal entry or something on your computer, so we could all see and benefit from more material from a variety of sources and all across the web.”
• “We wouldn't be able to have the format of our class this winter if we didn't have the web capability and the screens up there which provided a base for presentations.”
• “The back projection onto the white boards is nice because you can move more freely and use the board without having to worry that you are going to block the view and cast shadows or cause glare.”
• “In a language class the ability to write on the screen (that displays a web page or a slide) actually is extremely useful. I can also see how this would be valuable in an engineering or technical class when you are looking at examples and correcting them. If you are making errors, it would be profitable to correct them right there on the spot.”

The furniture and classroom flexibility

• “The break out space was just invaluable. I remember sitting in a room in Green for an earth sciences class and we had a projector and a traditional black board and just breaking into groups was a problem. Here it was so much more effective because there was breakout space plus break out boards and that just made the experience so much more meaningful and effective.”
• “I think one of the most valuable things about these rooms is the furniture – the chairs with wheels, the moveable tables, the rolling white boards. It means you can reconfigure the room for any scenario and it just makes the class so much more dynamic.”

Video conferencing

• “There were a couple speakers who were key to our progress in the course and obviously we couldn't fly them over just for the day so we set up a video conference and we could see the person and ourselves. The camera would turn and focus on whoever was talking and the person on the receiving end could see who it was. It was a very smooth interactive experience.”

Faculty and Instructors' use of technology

• “The thing about Greek and Latin is that there are a lot of developments in the last four or five years so that now a lot of the literature has been put online. Most of the grammar is online, and that is something we need to become very familiar with. We definitely got to use that in this class.”
• “I think right at the start we were all a little too fascinated by the technology and we were sending each other web pages on our computers and stuff like that. I think it was a childish way of getting to use the new technology, but now we've moved so far beyond that.”  

Course Customization

• “I like the idea of personalization through technology. I could see how content could be delivered in this multimedia way with each person receiving it in a different form depending on how they learn.”
• “The classroom could be geared so that for students who learn at different speeds, their varying needs can be accommodated. I like the idea of a voice activated Google search box that would be on one of these screens, which would basically take what was happening in a classroom constantly searching for results and you'd keep producing these ranked results on a page.”  

How do you envision classroom technology evolving?

• “I think in the future classrooms definitely are not going to look like this. There won't be so many gadgets around. We're just going to have smart surfaces. You can talk and the smart walls will record it.”
• “You'll be able to write on your table. Just scribble here. Maybe you won't even write and there will be some inherent way to capture what's going on and you just say you want to capture it and then it happens automatically. Then you have a way to seamlessly get back to the information.”
• “I think in the next three years there will be a wider adaptation of technology and this experimental phase will be over. There will be more videoconference-style lectures. More guest speakers than the same professor coming in week after week and delivering the same content.”

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