Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century

There are many of us who have received the benefit of a University education but “times they are a changing”, as the song goes! This month we are joined by our regular contributor; Peter Lloyd and guest contributor Toni Kelly; Chair of SCHOMS, the Standing Conference for Heads of Media in Higher Education, to discuss how new technologies and learning needs are being adapted to meet the demands of a new University generation.

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Peter Lloyd - Unifying the learning space

Whatever the future holds, it’s got to be flexible and multi-functional. Although that’s not explicitly helpful, it’s as close as the educational gurus are going to let us get to a vision of what the classroom (sorry, learning space) of the future might look like.

There’s academic skirmishing going on out there. On the one hand, traditionalists like students’ attention to be focused on the teacher or lecturer at the front of the room. So an interactive whiteboard (preferably one with a short throw projector) is fine. Less conventional educational technologists (who come in a variety of flavours) would like to see everything from students with their own interactive tablets to ‘mega’ classrooms with scores of students and several ‘teachers’ encouraging them to do their own learning.

So what are the common denominators?

There has to be interactivity and a network connection. With 60 per cent of UK classrooms now equipped with interactive whiteboards, nobody is going to turn the clock back to more primitive forms of chalk and talk. The teachers rely on laptops and their visual lesson structures. The students like the interactivity. And the whole process is controllable and measureable.

There are going to have to be multiple displays (or at least the potential to install them) and multiple inputs. Both video replay and videoconferencing links are becoming embedded in learning, as is on-demand information access; and collaborative working on projects requires students to be able to plug in laptops, tablets, smart phones and cameras to share information.

There’s going to have to be universally available network access for all those devices, plus audio replay, audio/video recording and content management.

But, getting back to the real common denominator – flexibility – the room (and faculty, and institution) of the future is going to have to have a highly sophisticated but easy-to-use management package and customised control software.
Just having a push-button panel on the wall by the door that controls the lights, raises or lowers the blinds and turns a projector on/off is no longer going to be sufficient. The system is going to have to monitor and control access to content and manage multiple devices. It’s going to have to be able to report faults (and maybe usage) to a central service point. It’s going to have to be customised, so that users are not confronted with stuff they don’t need or seems irrelevant. And it’s going to need to run on an affordable device, such as a tablet or a netbook.

And, by no means least, it’s going to have to be continuously updated. Every school, academy or college is going to have its own idea about what technology it wants to use, the content it wants to use, and what learning style it wants to adopt. That will change (probably annually) and no one will want to rip the whole installation out and start again.

Toni Kelly – Teaching Room Design

Within the Higher Education community, the design of effective and functional teaching and learning spaces has become an extremely important issue.  Traditionally, the view of reading a subject at university was that you would join large groups of students to be talked at by the “sage on the stage” in lecture theatres, whilst more intimate tutorials and seminars would be conducted in your tutor’s office.  However, the increase in access to a university education plus advances in technology over the last 20 years has played a major role to change this, taking us through a period where teaching and learning was highly formalised and organised.

The turn of the millennium has seen this change once again, and with the advent of “web 2.0” technologies, teaching and learning is once again returned to a focus on independent learning, creating graduates who are able to critically and independently analyze problems placed before them.  These changes have had a direct impact upon the type of space that is needed for university teaching.  We still need the lecture theatres and seminar rooms, but we also need spaces to accommodate other activities, such as independent working, groups working (which can be from 2 to 22 or even more), access to technology, access to library collections (both in print and electronically), wired display equipment students can plug into in addition to ubiquitous wireless for use with their own devices, and, not forgetting, -access to coffee!  Students need these facilities to be widely available to them, rather than located in a single area, perhaps a distance away from their subject base.

In addition to the technology having an impact upon the spaces provided for our students, the students themselves are driving changes within Universities.  Many (but it should be noted that not all) are coming to university having experienced technology being used in the classroom by their form teachers at primary and secondary school and are surprised at the change in the delivery of teaching and learning in the university context.  Many of them delight in the fact that teachers are still using chalk to demonstrate and explore the exciting new worlds and languages of such subjects as Mathematics and Chemistry, where the formulae are developed right before their eyes in the lecture.  On the other hand there are those subjects that come alive with the use of multi media images, and therein lies the problem.

Unlike the school teacher, university lecturers do not have their own “classrooms” where they can create a familiar and comfortable environment with all the tools needed to deliver the school curriculum to the pupils.  Rather, universities will have a pool of teaching spaces that are managed by a central team who will allocate rooms according to class size and equipment requirements.  This results in lecturers teaching in a number of different rooms and buildings over the course of the year, and as a result, most lecture theatres and lecture rooms will follow a fairly formal and generic design in order to support as many subject disciplines and teaching styles as possible.

Teaching to large numbers is an efficient and effective way of delivering core information, and as a result, (as demonstrated in the USA where very large lecture facilities are still being built), lectures will be with us for some time to come.  However, once the lecture is over, much more, small group work, both formal and informal, is taking place, and spaces to accommodate these new activities are being developed on a large scale.

These spaces are much more focussed on the learning rather than the teaching: it is the learner around whom the furniture and the facilities are created.  These new features include bespoke tables to accommodate groups, chairs with wheels to enable easy movement between groups, display systems that allow the students to “show and tell” without having to leave their workstations, writing boards to support discussions, PCs for internet searches and wireless access for mobile devices.  But. these spaces should also be fully functional to support activities for which technology is not required.  As teaching and learning develops, these spaces need to be “agile” to allow them to adapt easily to new technologies and ideas as they happen.

Universities work in an environment where virtually everything is benchmarked against the “Student Experience”, and although the learning and teaching spaces represent a small proportion of the estate overall, they are the spaces that the students will inhabit for most of their time at the institution, and as a result, they need to be appropriate and fit for purpose whilst ensuring that they are innovative, exciting and inspiring places to be.