smart classrooms

FLEXspace: Sharing the best of learning space design [Grush, Stephens, &Frazee]

On 05/18/2016, in active learning, collaboration, colleges, community colleges, higher education, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, smart classrooms, universities, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

FLEXspace: Sharing the best of learning space design — from campustechnology.com by Mary Grush
A Q&A with Lisa Stephens and Rebecca Frazee

Excerpt:

FLEXspace is a repository and open online education resource institutions can use to research and share information about successful learning space design. A true grass roots collaboration, access is free to .edu domain owners. Using ARTstor Shared Shelf, the community is growing a rich resource that, after only about five years since its inception, is already demonstrating its potential to improve both the process of creating campus learning spaces and the science of using them. Campus Technology spoke with two FLEXspace team leaders (who work remotely from their home institutions): Lisa Stephens, Senior Strategist, SUNY Academic Innovation, SUNY System Administration and the University of Buffalo; and Rebecca Frazee, FLEXspace Manager and Lecturer, Learning Design and Technology Program, San Diego State University.

Some other items regarding learning spaces:

The Learning Space Rating System where they mention:
- The four categories of formal learning space they use in LSRS version 1 are:
  - Discussion-focused classrooms designed to support meetings of the full course cohort (example: seminar rooms)
  - Team-based classrooms with fixed furnishing (example: the step-up design)
  - Presentation-focused classrooms (examples: lecture halls, auditoria)
  - Versatile classrooms that support some combination of the above designs, or are slightly more specialized in the type of learning they support (example: a room with entirely mobile furnishings that can be set in a traditional or team-based fashion

From the Learning Spaces Collaboratory

Interactive whiteboards facing steep decline globally — from thejournal.com by Richard Chang

Driving questions from the “Learning Spaces Collaboratory Roundtable” [held at Boston U]

On 04/25/2016, in active learning, higher education, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, smart classrooms, STEAM-related, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Excerpt from the Learning Spaces Collaboratory Roundtable | Spring 2016: Focusing on the Future of Planning Learning Spaces | Boston University

Also see this PDF file.

Driving Questions

How can we promote active learning environments—in classrooms and in teaching labs? What does it take to promote small group peer-to-peer interaction and learning?
How can spaces promote investigative, cross-disciplinary problem-based learning and problem-solving?
What does a ‘technology-rich’ learning environment mean? What are the tools needed in learning spaces to prepare students for increasing technology-dependent careers. How many ways and places can technologies be used in a facility to serve the campus community as well as to support outreach beyond the campus?
In our planning, how can we exploit opportunities for sharing, breaking down departmental silos? How can we maximize the use of flexible or case method classrooms, student study, break-out space, and shared administrative space? Does it work to distribute disciplines throughout the building rather than to cluster them by floor? What needs to be next to what?
How can a goal of increasing lower division student success in STEM disciplines be addressed in the planning process? What does it take to attract students to these fields and motivate them to persist? How do we create a supportive environment conducive to success?
How do our spaces reflect the social nature of learning, the need for collegiality, the unplanned interactions and conversations that shape and nurture communities?

Other Driving Questions

What can the design of the building do to promote a culture of innovation in academic programs?
How will students and faculty interact in this building, and how are team based collaborations supported within and outside of formal instruction times?
How can we design for the future and encourage innovation and new ways of learning?
How do we create an environment of entrepreneurial thinking, with the vibrancy and experimentation atmosphere of the West coast combined with the structure and richness of the Northeast academic history?
How can we create awareness, connections and encourage collaboration through our architecture?
How do we capture the “Maker” experience of rapidly prototyping ideas in a non-STEM building?
How essential is territorialization in a dynamic, academic environment, and what are the boundaries that should be defined by the
physical environment?
.
Since Bryant has been experimenting with rapidly adaptable learning environments, through recent campus renovations, the AIC project benefited from lessons learned, including:* Maximize clear structural dimensions to facilitate combining adjacent rooms if larger spaces are needed in a few years.
* Make all tiers in classrooms easily removable to switch to flat floor environments if desired.
* Maximize writing surfaces throughout the building.
* Limit the negative impact of technology by creating spaces that encourage low-tech human interaction and promote hands on mapping of strategies and ideas

Other Driving Questions

To enhance the educational experience, specifically for a large student population, what elements need to be considered in planning a learning community?
How have technological advances in the science workplace changed the design of the undergraduate curriculum? How does this reshape space for different types of learning?
How does the need for safety and efficiency drive operations and space planning?
How do we create a welcoming environment and flexible learning spaces? How big is too big?
How do we rigorously and responsibly plan for an unknown future?
To support student success, what elements and adjacencies should an institution/design team consider for an academic building?

‘Anyone who walks into these spaces wants to teach in them’ — from ucalgary.ca by Joni Miltenburg
Instructors can apply to teach in the Taylor Institute’s flexible learning space

Excerpt:

Leighton Wilks noticed a palpable difference when his class moved from a traditional lecture-style classroom to an active learning space. Not only did attendance increase, but students were more engaged and collaborative.

“I see a lot more team cohesion. They’re talking more to each other because they’re sitting with their teams. It’s nice to foster that teamwork throughout the semester.”

Wilks is an instructor in the Haskayne School of Business and teaches a second-year organizational behaviour course in the newly-renovated active learning classroom in Scurfield Hall. He found that the space breaks down the boundary between instructor and student.

“Instead of being up at the front, I’m walking around. I feel I get a lot more questions and get to know the students better, which is important.”

From DSC:
Also see my notes from this year’s Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference.

Creating Great Digital Spaces for Learning — from slideshare.net by Phil Vincent
Professor Andrew Harrison, Professor of Practice at University of Wales Trinity St David and Director, Spaces That Work Ltd., from Jisc DigiFest 2016

21st-century learning environments — from webcpm.com by Kenneth A. Gruskin, Michael Searson

Excerpts:

Pedagogy
Preparation for the 21st-century workforce demands that educators shift the authority for learning to the students. After all, today’s workers are expected to function in collaborative and horizontal environments, as opposed to the “factory” driven, top-down, solitary worker spaces of yesterday. Therefore, contemporary learning environments should lean heavily on collaborative spaces, supported through personalized learning technologies. Good pedagogy encourages student engagement through complex collaborative projects based on real-world problems.
…
Technology
Innovative learning should incorporate a true BYOD (bring your own device) environment that provides opportunities for student-centered learning, beginning with their own personalized technologies — from laptops and tablets to smartphones and wearable devices. This approach leverages student devices and reduces the need for institutionally provided equipment.
…
Supporting Distance Learning
Strategies being used within Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions provide the means to support the involvement of remote participants, whether they are present on the WAN or solely connecting via Internet services. Since these solutions are moving to cloud-based topologies, they are mostly services that individuals subscribe to directly or have access to through campus-based subscription services. These features are also beginning to appear in social media environments, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, so the opportunity for use may become as easy as installing another app in the not-toodistant future.

Engaging students with interactive technologies — from webcpm.com by Bill Nattress

Excerpt:

Wireless presentation, lecture capture, online collaboration and active-learning methodologies all require the ability for any and all participants to engage the installed resources within the facility while they also access their personal content; whether local to their personal devices or within the cloud. With the video tools now available to the consumer, the use of conferencing apps will continue to rise. The environments that engage students and faculty will need to allow for any user to log in and access his or her content and presentation appliances without hurdles or roadblocks. Access to subject matter experts or other individuals will also need to be supported as well. With the deployment of video tools via social media, users will also rely more on their personal accounts for contact management instead of an address book. These changes in workflow are disruptors to the policies that many institutions have put in place as it relates to the BYOD usage surrounding their networks. Success of these communication and education solutions needs the networks to focus on and easily support three key technologies: wireless presentation, collaboration and participation by remote team members.

Key issues in teaching and learning 2016 [educause.edu]

On 03/30/2016, in adjunct faculty, analytics, blended learning, digital learning, faculty, higher education, hybrid learning, learning spaces, mobile learning, multimedia, new business models, online learning, personalized/customized learning, professional development, smart classrooms, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

Key issues in teaching and learning 2016 — from educause.edu

Active Learning: In Need of Deeper Exploration — from facultyfocus.com by Maryellen Weimer

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

The one proposed by Bonwell and Eison in an early (and now classic) active learning monograph is widely referenced: involving “students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing.” (p. 2)

Those are fine places to start, but as interest in active learning has grown—and with its value now firmly established empirically—what gets labeled as active learning continues to expand. Carr, Palmer, and Hagel recently wrote, “Active learning is a very broad concept that covers or is associated with a wide variety of learning strategies.” (p. 173) They list some strategies now considered to be active learning. I’ve added a few more: experiential learning; learning by doing (hands-on learning); applied learning; service learning; peer teaching (in various contexts); lab work; role plays; case-based learning; group work of various kinds; technology-based strategies such as simulations, games, clickers, and various smart phone applications; and classroom interaction, with participation and discussion probably being the most widely used of all active learning approaches. Beyond strategies are theories such as constructivism that have spun off collections of student-centered approaches that promote student autonomy, self-direction, and self-regulation of learning.

“It’s Not You, It’s the Room”— Are the High-Tech, Active Learning Classrooms Worth It? [2013] – from cvm.umn.edu by Sehoya Cotner, Jessica Loper, J. D. Walker, and D. Christopher Brooks

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Several institutions have redesigned traditional learning spaces to better realize the potential of active, experiential learning. We compare student performance in traditional and active learning classrooms in a large, introductory biology course using the same syllabus, course goals, exams, and instructor. Using ACT scores as predictive, we found that students in the active learning classroom outperformed expectations, whereas those in the traditional classroom did not. By replicating initial work, our results provide empirical confirmation that new, technology-enhanced learning environments positively and independently affect student learning. Our data suggest that creating space for active learning can improve student performance in science courses. However, we recognize that such a commitment of resources is impractical for many institutions, and we offer recommendations for applying what we have learned to more traditional spaces.
…
We believe that the investment in ALCs at the University of Minnesota was worth it. Documented increases in student engagement and confirmed average gains of nearly 5 percentage points in final grades are improvements in the student academic experience that few educational interventions could aspire to. However, whether these improvements warrant the capital investment in ALCs is a judgment each educational institution must make for itself, drawing on local priorities and resources.

Instructors may need to think seriously and creatively about changing the manner in which they deliver their courses in spaces such as these —not only for the sake of navigating the challenges of teaching in a decentered space, but also to take advantage of the features of the room that allow us to better realize the benefits of active learning. The classroom architecture is bound to frustrate the efforts of faculty who don’t yield to the rooms’ novel demands. There is no well-identified “stage” from which to deliver a traditional lecture. Half of the students in the class may be facing away from the instructor at any given time. Teachers who view silence as engagement will need to adjust their perceptions, as one goal of decentralized classrooms is increased small-group interaction and this activity can be noisy and difficult to monitor. And, in the case of the ALCs at our institution, there is a learning curve with respect to the technological capabilities of the rooms.

Excerpt from the University of Minnesota’s Active Learning Classrooms web page:

What Is an Active Learning Classroom (ALC)?
ALC is the term often used to describe the student-centered, technology-rich learning environments at the University of Minnesota. U of M ALCs feature large round tables with places for nine students. Each table supports three laptops, with switching technology that connects them to a fixed flat-panel display projection system, and three microphones. There is a centered teaching station which allows the instructor to select and display table-specific information. Multiple white boards or glass-surface marker boards are distributed around the perimeter of the classrooms.

From DSC:

Problem/question:

If you wanted to, how do you make a digital version of 20+ feet worth of writings and drawings on 2+ chalkboards or whiteboards that are put together?

The applications that I’ve run across so far — whether they are meant for PCs, Macs, tablets, or smartphones — don’t do it, as they’re too limited on screen real estate.

Some have tried using lightboards and making recordings of their equations or other work….

…but those solutions seem to fall short, at least in my mind, if you need to reference something early on in the long equation…you know, on that first “board” of information that you completed and then erased. (I suppose if a student was watching a recording, you could tell them to go back to Marker 1 in the video…and they can go back and review that portion of the video…but that requires more time/editing/setup. Time that faculty members often don’t have.) So, again, lightboards seem somewhat limited in their real estate.

Then, a while back, I saw this 360-degree ring of display screens at Washington State University…

WSU-ActiveLearningClassroom-Nov2015

and it got me to thinking…hmmm…yes…if, as a faculty member was using an application that they could write on and the equation could appear on the screens overhead. Faculty could use something akin to a pen & touch display from Wacom in order to write the equations — but the software would need to allow them to scroll backwards and forwards throughout their long equations. They could use those tools to highlight or further annotate something that was previously covered.

In this type of physical/AV-related solution, it would seem that the students would be best situated on the inside of the circle, looking upwards to watch the equation build on itself. Having a huge amount of digital space to work with could mean that they could turn their Node Chairs around to see any portion of the equation. Faculty members could also, I suppose, use laser pointers to point to something up on the displays.

Again though, they would need to be able to scroll left to right, top to bottom, say on something like the 160 acres (vs 20+ feet of chalkboard/whiteboard) you get on a workspace in Bluescape…

…then you would have a lot of digital real estate to work with. So that was one approach I was wondering about.

But then, I saw some interesting items regarding Virtual Reality, and POW! There it is! An enormous amount of digital screen real estate where the users could go where they wanted to on it. That is, the vision here would be that each student could control where they want to go within the digital canvas.

Some related items to this:

See:
Virtual Desktop 1.0 Trailer

Obviously, I need to further think this through and investigate what’s possible as time goes by. But I wanted to get this out there in case some vendor can help us get there sooner rather than later.

A relevant link:

Playing games on a 19-foot TV, climbing mountains and shooting bows — from polygon.com by Brian Crecente
Excerpt:

But the one I found most compelling was the most mundane creation for Vive: The SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode. Slip on the black plastic headset and instead of dropping into a fantastical world of mouthy orbs, atop a mountain with a robot dog or inside a game, I found myself sitting in a chair in a fairly non-descript room facing a big television screen. To be specific, in this case big means about 19 feet.

Addendum of something that’s relevant here and that I just ran across today:

The Future of AV Displays — from thejournal.com by Dennis Pierce
Today, students are interacting with content on large touchscreen flat panels. Soon, they could be using immersive head-mounted displays.

Digitally-based means of learning are going to skyrocket!!! Here’s why. [Christian]

On 03/18/2016, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, active learning, analytics, assessment, assistive technologies, blended learning, Bring your own device (BYOD), collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, distance education, education technology, emerging technologies, face-to-face, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), hybrid learning, ideas, innovation, interactivity, internet, IT in HE, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, mirroring and/or multiple devices, mobile learning, mobile technologies, multi-touch, multimedia, Near Field Communication (NFC), new business models, online learning, online media, online tutoring, participation, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, second screen apps, smart classrooms, smart/connected TV, student-related, teaching & learning, telecommunications, telepresence, television, tools, training / L&D, trends, universities, user experience (UX), using teams, vendors, videoconferencing, virtual tutoring, web-based collaboration, webinars, by Daniel Christian

Key point from DSC:
Digitally-based means of learning are going to skyrocket!!! Far more than what we’ve seen so far! There are several trends that are occurring to make this so.

As background here, some of the keywords and phrases that are relevant to this posting include:

Wireless content sharing
Wireless collaboration solutions
Active learning based classrooms
Conference rooms
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
Enterprise wireless display solutions
Enterprise collaboration solutions
Cross platform support: iOS, Android, Windows
Personalized learning
Learning analytics

Some of the relevant products in this area include:

Bluescape
Mezzanine from Oblong Industries
Montage from DisplayNote Technologies
ThinkHub and ViewHub from T1V
Mersive Solstice
Crestron AirMedia
Barco Clickshare
Haworth Workware Wireless
Christi Brio
AMX enzo
NovoConnect from Vivitek
Arrive MediaPoint
Apple TV
Chromecast

From DSC:

First of all, consider the following products and the functionalities they offer.

People who are in the same physical space can collaborate with people from all over the world — no matter if they are at home, in another office, on the road, etc.

For several of these products, remote employees/consultants/trainers/learners can contribute content to the discussions, just like someone in the same physical location can.

ThinkHub-March2016

From DSC:

Many of these sorts of systems & software are aimed at helping people collaborate — again, regardless of where they are located. Remote learners/content contributors are working in tandem with a group of people in the same physical location. If this is true in business, why can’t it be true in the world of education?

So keep that in mind, as I’m now going to add on a few other thoughts and trends that build upon these sorts of digitally-based means of collaborating.

Q: Towards that end…ask yourself, what do the following trends and items have in common?

The desire to capture and analyze learner data to maximize learning
Colleges’ and universities’ need to increase productivity (which is also true in the corporate & K-12 worlds)
The trend towards implementing more active learning-based environments
The increasing use of leveraging students’ devices for their learning (i.e., the BYOD phenomenon)
The continued growth and increasing sophistication of algorithms

A: All of these things may cause digitally-based means of learning to skyrocket!!!

To wrap up this line of thought, below are some excerpts from recent articles that illustrate what I’m trying to get at here.

Embrace the Power of Data
A continuous improvement mindset is important. Back-end learning analytics, for example, can reveal where large numbers of students are struggling, and may provide insights into questions that require new feedback or content areas that need more development. Data can also highlight how students are interacting with the content and illuminate things that are working well—students’ lightbulb moments.

— Five Principles for Your Learning Design Toolkit
from edsurge.com by Amanda Newlin

Mitchell gave the example of flight simulators, which not only provide students with a way to engage in the activity that they want to learn, but also have data systems that monitor students’ learning over time, providing them with structured feedback at just the right moment. This sort of data-centric assessment of learning is happening in more and more disciplines — and that opens the door to more innovation, he argued.

…

A promising example, said Thille, is the use of educational technology to create personalized and adaptive instruction. As students interact with adaptive technology, the system collects large amounts of data, models those data, and then makes predictions about each student based on their interactions, she explained. Those predictions are then used for pedagogical decision-making — either feeding information back into the system to give the student a personalized learning path, or providing insights to faculty to help them give students individualized support.

…

“We need the models and the data to be open, transparent, peer-reviewable and subject to academic scrutiny.”

…

“We began to actually examine what we could do differently — based not upon hunches and traditions, but upon what the data told us the problems were for the students we enroll,” said Renick. “We made a commitment not to raise our graduation rate through getting better students, but through getting better — and that gain meant looking in the mirror and making some significant changes.”

…

A 21st-century learning culture starts with digital content. In 2010, Jackson State University was looking for ways that technology could better address the needs of today’s learner. “We put together what we call our cyberlearning ecosystem,” said Robert Blaine, dean of undergraduate studies and cyberlearning. “What that means is that we’re building a 21st-century learning culture for all of our students, writ large across campus.” At the core of that ecosystem is digital content, delivered via university-supplied iPads.

— 7 Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know
from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly

On Bennett’s wish list right now is an application that allows students to give feedback at specific points of the videos that they’re watching at home. This would help him pinpoint and fix any “problem” areas (e.g. insufficient instructions for difficult topics/tasks) and easily see where students are experiencing the most difficulties.

TechSmith’s now-retired “Ask3” video platform, for example, would have done the trick. It allowed users to watch a video and ask text-based questions at the point where playback was stopped. “I’d like to be able to look at my content and say, ‘Here’s a spot where there are a lot of questions and confusion,'” said Bennett, who also sees potential in an “I get it” button that would allow students to hit the button when everything clicks. “That would indicate the minimum viable video that I’d need to produce.” Learning Catalytics offers a similar product at a fee, Bennett said, “but I can’t charge my students $20 a year to use it.”

— 6 Flipped Learning Technologies To Watch in 2016
from thejournal.com by Bridget McCrea

All of these trends lend themselves to causing a major increase in the amount of learning that occurs via digitally-based means and methods.

My notes from last week’s “Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference” [Christian]

On 03/11/2016, in active learning, collaboration, colleges, communications, community colleges, future of higher education, instructional design, learning spaces, maker movement, pedagogy, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, smart classrooms, teaching & learning, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Here are my notes from last week’s Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference. This was just the second time this conference was offered, but the topics addressed therein are highly relevant to the future of learning spaces within higher education. I hope they are helpful or interesting to some of you.

Implementing Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) is about moving things from being teacher-centric to student-centric. There’s far less lecture and more hands-on, collaborative experiences; there’s more project-based learning and active learning. More discussions, case studies, problem-solving, use of small groups. The Jigsaw method was nicely modeled at the conference.

Getting solid results boils down to designing and implementing effective pedagogies. A space can’t do it for you. A professor needs to align his/her instructional activities with the desired instructional outcomes.

“35-40% of seats on a campus should be for informal learning.”

Per Gary McNay, Principal Perkins+Will
Libraries, cafes, student commons…

An interesting, award-winning approach from Singapore Management University (SMU)

On 03/07/2016, in active learning, Asia, business, collaboration, education technology, higher education, ideas, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, MBA, pedagogy, smart classrooms, student-related, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

SMU’s pioneering pedagogy, SMU-X, recognised globally for innovation, creativity and impact — from by smu.edu.sg

Excerpt:

SMU launched the SMU-X initiative in 2015 following three-and-a-half years of study and conceptualisation. Through SMU-X, the University introduced across all its six Schools innovative and fresh curriculum that is multi-disciplinary and hands-on, and also created unconventional, flexible spaces for 24/7 use that meet the usage patterns and behaviours of the millennial student.

Four key principles characterise all SMU-X courses:

(i) inter-disciplinary content and activities;
(ii) experiential learning via an actual problem/issue faced by an organisation;
(iii) active student-mentoring by faculty and industry; and
(iv) three-way learning by faculty, student and partner organisation, in the form of a tripartite sharing forum at the end of the course.

The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange – FLEXspace – is a robust, open access repository populated with examples of learning spaces. It contains high resolution images and related information that describes detailed attributes of these spaces from institutions across the globe. The incentive for participation is to showcase innovative design solutions open to peer review ranking and comments. As more contributions are received, the repository will emerge into a very useful planning resource for education and supporting entities at multiple levels.

From DSC:
You can browse images, video, and documents.

You can get some new ideas, sources of inspiration…and get the creative juices going. The site covers a variety of learning spaces — from large lecture halls to library lounges to active learning spaces.

Google plans to make your smartphone a portal to the world around you thanks to a new smart browser. [Moore]

On 02/18/2016, in 21st century, A/V -- audio/visual, emerging technologies, Europe, Google, innovation, internet, IT in HE, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, machine-to-machine communications, mobile technologies, Near Field Communication (NFC), smart classrooms, smart/connected TV, by Daniel Christian

Google brings the physical web to your phone — from techweekeurope.co.uk by Michael Moore
Google plans to make your smartphone a portal to the world around you thanks to a new smart browser.

Excerpt:

Google plans to make your smartphone a portal to the world around you thanks to a new smart browser.

The company’s next version of Chrome for Android, version 49 (currently in beta), will be able to alert users to low-energy beacons near to them, which can then be interacted with for interesting information or offers.

This means that walking past a tube station will send a pop-up alert about the next departure, or vouchers being sent when walking past a favourite shop, which is all part of what Google is calling ‘The Physical Web’.

DanielChristian-Combining-Digital-Physical-Worlds-Oct2014

Addendum on 2/19/16:

The campus: Where AV meets IoT — from avnetwork.com by Carolyn Heinze

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

At the classroom level, Dey believes that GIoTTO offers the potential for improved audiovisual experiences. “[There is] the use of sensing technology to detect changes in the environment, [where] you may want to change the audiovisual settings in a classroom, to detecting where people are in a classroom to change audiovisual settings, to even detecting: why is my projector not actually projecting on the screen?” he illustrated. This last use case can speed up troubleshooting, therefore decreasing help desk calls, he added. “Building on that, obviously we have tons of seminar rooms and other rooms that are meant for specific audiovisual needs, and you can imagine that putting additional sensing technology in those spaces would enable us to be more creative in understanding how those spaces get used, and how we can improve those spaces at the same time.”

From DSC:
Though the jigsaw technique has been around for decades, it came to my mind the other day as we recently built a highly-collaborative, experimental learning space at our college — some would call it an active learning-based classroom. There are 7 large displays throughout the space, with each display being backed up by Crestron-related hardware and software that allows the faculty member to control what’s appearing on each display. For example, the professor can take what is on Group #1’s display and send the content from that display throughout the classroom. Or they can display something from a document camera or something from their own laptop, iPad, or smartphone. Students can plug in their devices (BYOD) and connect to the displays via HDMI cables (Phase I) and wirelessly (Phase II).

I like this type of setup because it allows for students to quickly and efficiently contribute their own content and the results of their own research to a discussion. Groups can present their content throughout the space.

With that in mind, here are some resources re: the jigsaw classroom/technique.

From Wikipedia:

The jigsaw technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed. It breaks classes into groups and breaks assignments into pieces that the group assembles to complete the (jigsaw) puzzle. It was designed by social psychologist Elliot Aronson to help weaken racial cliques in forcibly integrated schools.

The technique splits classes into mixed groups to work on small problems that the group collates into a final outcome. For example, an in-class assignment is divided into topics. Students are then split into groups with one member assigned to each topic. Working individually, each student learns about his or her topic and presents it to their group. Next, students gather into groups divided by topic. Each member presents again to the topic group. In same-topic groups, students reconcile points of view and synthesize information. They create a final report. Finally, the original groups reconvene and listen to presentations from each member. The final presentations provide all group members with an understanding of their own material, as well as the findings that have emerged from topic-specific group discussion.

From jigsaw.org

Without blended and/or online learning, obtaining data & using analytics in education only gets you so far. [Christian]

On 02/09/2016, in analytics, blended learning, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, education technology, elearning, face-to-face, higher education, hybrid learning, ideas, instructional design, IT in HE, learning spaces, MBA, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, smart classrooms, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Big data is a big theme these days — in a variety of industries. Higher ed is no exception, where several vendors continue to develop products that hope to harness the power of big data (and to hopefully apply the lessons learned in a variety of areas, including retention).

However as an Instructional Designer, when I think of capturing and using data in the context of higher education, I’m not thinking about institutional type of data mining and the corresponding dashboards that might be involved therein. I’m thinking of something far more granular — something that resembles a tool for an individual professor to use.

I’m thinking more about individual students and their learning. I’m thinking about this topic in terms of providing additional information for a faculty member to use to gauge the learning within his or her particular classes — and to be able to highlight issues for them to address.

So, for example, when I’m thinking about how a mathematics professor might obtain and use data, I’m thinking of things like:

How did each individual do on this particular math problem?
Who got it right? Who got it wrong?
What percentage of the class got it right? What percentage of the class got it wrong?
For those who got the problem wrong, where in the multi-step process did they go wrong?

So perhaps even if we’re only obtaining students’ final answers — whether that be via clickers, smartphones, laptops, and/or tablets — data is still being created. Data that can then be analyzed and used to steer the learning. This type of information can then help the mathematics professor follow up accordingly — either with some individuals or with the entire class if he/she saw many students struggling with a new concept.

Such data gathering can get even more granular if one is using elearning types of materials. Here, the developers can measure and track things like mouse clicks, paths taken, and more. So like the approaching Internet of Things, data can get produced on a massive scale.

But very few mathematics professors have the time to:

manually track X/Y/or Z per student
manually capture how an entire class just did on a math problem
manually document where each student who got a problem incorrect went wrong

So in the way that I’m thinking about this topic, this entire push/idea of using data and analytics in education requires things to happen digitally — where results can automatically be stored without requiring any manual efforts on the part of the professor.

The ramifications of this are enormous.

That is, the push to use analytics in education — at least at the personalized learning level that I’m thinking of — really represents and actually requires a push towards using blended and/or online-based learning. Using strictly 100% face-to-face based classrooms and environments — without any digital components involved — won’t cut it if we want to harness the power of analytics/data mining to improve student learning.

Though this may seem somewhat obvious, again, the ramifications are huge for how faculty members structure their courses and what tools/methods that they choose to utilize. But this goes way beyond the professor. It also has enormous implications for those departments and teams who are working on creating/revising learning spaces — especially in terms of the infrastructures such spaces offer and what tools might be available within them. It affects decision makers all the way up to the board-level as well (who may not be used to something other than a face-to-face setting…something they recall from their own college days).

What do you think? Are you and/or your institution using big data and analytics? If so, how?

Also see:

Big data and higher education: These apps change everything — from bigdatalandscape.com

Excerpt:

Big Data is going to college. The companies on this list have been developing innovative higher education analytics apps. Universities are realizing the importance of harnessing Big Data for the purposes of helping students to succeed, helping instructors to know what students still need to learn, analyzing efficiency in all areas, boosting enrollment, and more.

For example, CourseSmart embeds analytics directly into digital textbooks. These analytics provide an “engagement index score,” which measures how much students are interacting with their eTextbooks (viewing pages, highlighting, writing notes, etc.). Researchers have found that that the engagement index score helps instructors to accurately predict student outcomes more than traditional measurement methods, such as class participation.

In addition, there are dashboards that enable Big Data analytics and visualization for the purpose of monitoring higher education KPIs such as enrollment, accreditation, effectiveness, research, financial information, and metrics by class and by department. Read on to find out about the companies that are shaping Big Data analytics in higher education.

How five edtech start-ups are using big data to boost business education — from businessbecause.com by Seb Murray
MOOC platforms explore analytics with b-school partners

Excerpts:

“Data is an amazing resource for teachers, who glean detailed feedback on how learners are processing information,” says Julia Stiglitz, director of business development at Coursera, the online learning site with 17 million users.

Coursera, which works with the b-schools IE, Yale and Duke Fuqua, offers a dashboard that gives teachers insight into when students are most likely to stop watching a video, and the percentage who answer assessment questions correctly the first time around.
…
“By carefully assessing course data, from mouse clicks to time spent on tasks to evaluating how students respond to various assessments, researchers hope to shed light on how learners access information and master materials,” says Nancy Moss, edX’s director of communications.

New Media Consortium (NMC) & Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) release the NMC Horizon Report > 2016 Higher Ed Edition — from nmc.org

Excerpt:

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) are jointly releasing the NMC Horizon Report > 2016 Higher Education Edition at the 2016 ELI Annual Meeting. This 13^th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.

The report identifies six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology across three adoption horizons spanning over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders, educational technologists, and faculty a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The report provides higher education leaders with in-depth insight into how trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educational technology, along with their implications for policy, leadership, and practice.

Learning Ecosystems

FLEXspace: Sharing the best of learning space design [Grush, Stephens, &Frazee]

Key issues in teaching and learning 2016 [educause.edu]

“It’s Not You, It’s the Room” — Are the High-Tech, Active Learning Classrooms Worth It?” + other items re: active learning

Potential solutions when you need a digital version of 20+ feet worth of whiteboards to explain those long equations! Could be powerful. [Christian]

My notes from last week’s “Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference” [Christian]

Google plans to make your smartphone a portal to the world around you thanks to a new smart browser. [Moore]

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