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[ Music ]
So creating active learning classrooms is one of our top priorities in Learning Technologies;
to partner with the campuses and the academic units to really work together
to create a different kind of classroom than what many of us have come to think
about when we think about a college classroom.
When we talk about active learning, we're talking about student engagement;
we're talking about collaborative work among the students at the table.
Things that allow them to actively work with course content and not just absorb it.
This classroom has a number of advantages, particularly in terms of the technology,
allowing us to work both at the small group level at the student tables, but then also to pull
that content and to share it with the larger class;
that's probably the most unique feature this room has to offer.
You can like work in a group, and you have your own screen, so that's really great
because you can see everything displayed in front of you.
And there's a lot of screens throughout the room, so you don't have to look just straight
at the professor, you can look like wherever you need to to see everything.
And once she puts the videos up, it's great, because they're right in front of you.
Everything in this space is wired to everything else.
There's nearly 3 miles of cable that are being used to connect the tables to the video wall.
There is push-to-talk microphones on every table.
We didn't put 6 computers on each table, instead we enabled students to bring their own devices
and be able to plug them in and to display them at the ends of the tables.
I really, really liked having a small group.
It's nice that there's like 1 screen and maybe 5 or 6 chairs around that screen;
so being able to work in a group of that size is really nice.
And it also gets the class out of lecturing, which lecturing is good, but when you're able
to do a group project like this in a small group like this in class,
so you have the instructor there to answer questions and to add feedback and that sort
of thing as you're doing it, it makes learning -- especially the classes that I took in here,
it makes it a totally different experience but definitely better.
What I like about this learning environment compared
to a traditional classroom is the intimacy between me and the students and among themselves.
What I think works well with the students is they do have the opportunity
to interact in class in planned times.
So they don't have to be quite and they don't have to sit by
and they don't have to be passively in class.
They do have the opportunity to actively learn in class.
The things that I use the most in this classroom are the monitors
at each particular station, because I allow the students to do work on their own
by giving them some guidance at the beginning of a class, and then they bring up their projects
and work within their group on their project at their individual stations.
In the world we live in today, we don't go off and sit in a cave and solve problems;
and we work on diverse teams supported by technology
to solve the pressing problems of the world.
One of the key things for the collaborative learning studio is it really speaks
to the value of a residential education.
Students can come here, they can work in groups, they can debate orally with each other,
the instructor can see what's going on, can provide insight, some coaching.
Take one group's work and throw it to the big screen and everyone else kind of go aw, or go no,
wait a minute, that's not exactly right.
There's really something powerful in human interaction,
particularly face-to-face interaction with amazing technology support.
And that's really the heart of the Collaborative Learning Studio.
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