Over the past few weeks, Brian Young and I have been consulting with faculty on the use of lecture capture, as part of our Echo360 pilot. It’s been very interesting doing this with Brian, firstly because he’s smart and really understands education, but also because he’s been responsible for much of the pedagogical side of our Clickers implementation at Penn State. Because both lecture capture and clickers and very much classroom-based technologies, we’ve had several conversations about how we, as an institution, think about classroom technology from a teaching and learning perspective. And as we adopt more tech like this, this conversation becomes more and more important.
I should start by saying that by classrooms, I literally mean the rooms with chairs and desks and podiums that are scheduled for classes every semester (design of other informal learning spaces is a different discussion). Penn State has done very well with providing the baseline technologies to support teaching and learning in our classrooms. We have 356 “technology classrooms” supported by central ITS (and many more outside of ITS) that have podiums equipped with computers, microphones, projectors, and network connections. As anyone who’s involved in facilities management knows, just doing this much is a massive and costly logistical challenge. Much of the cost here comes from retrofitting rooms that were originally built 70 years ago (think asbestos abatement and running wires when there’s only a dirt floor). Because of the cost, we have to think of the absolute most important technologies to support teaching, and make sure those things (computers, audio equipment, projectors, networks, etc.) are highly reliable and easy to maintain. But these “baseline” technologies afford enormous opportunities.
Think of this type of room as a blank slate for learning designers. The forethought of our classroom tech and network designers allow us to be very flexible and to try new things. Clickers and lecture capture integrated pretty seamlessly. This frees us up to think about the affordances of these systems and how they relate to how faculty teach, manage their classroom, and interact with their students. I suggest that educational technologists refocus our attention on these spaces, and as a community identify the kinds of teaching and learning we want to see more of and to develop recommendations for future classroom investments. Clickers are a good example of having identified a clear need for more and easier to administer formative assessment and then persuing a technology that enabled that (I’m not sure if that was the actual process, but it can be). Lecture capture enables classroom flipping, where static lecture material moves out of the classroom to videos so we can incorporate more active learning during scheduled class time. What are our other classroom needs? What compelling technologies have you seen to meet these needs?
FYI – we’re looking to make Classroom Technologies a prominent theme in our upcoming TLT events.