Incubating Next-Gen.Edu

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The 21st Century Classroom

Incubating Next-Gen.Edu

6/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

At Santa Clara University, incubator rooms are configured for power and networking, and to accommodate a great variety of potential applications--even if many of them will fail. The successes get rolled out across campus.

Big Rooms, Small Rooms

Santa Clara University (CA), an 8,000- student campus in Silicon Valley, dedicated its new Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library this past March; faculty and students will begin to occupy the experimental classroom spaces of the $95 million facility in the fall. It's clear to see that the building's technology-enhanced spaces are dramatically different from almost every other classroom on campus. And while many ideas were borrowed from among those tried out in other schools' incubator spaces, many arose from Santa Clara's own incubator classrooms, says CIO Ron Danielson.

Experiment, experiment. Today, the four-story, 194,000-square-foot learning commons structure includes several spaces where instructional experimentation can take place. The smallest is a set of three rooms that originally were SCU's own incubator rooms, now termed "educational experimentation rooms." Two of the rooms hold eight people and one holds six. At roughly 200 square feet each, they are not classrooms in the traditional sense, since they're not big enough to hold class in. Rather, "They're dedicated to exploring new technologies that particular faculty bring in," Danielson explains. In fact, the idea is that a faculty member will submit a proposal to use one of the spaces for a term, or perhaps an entire school year. Funds are made available through a technology innovation fund.

"Maybe somebody in the sciences will have instruments that aren't ‘wet lab' kinds of things, but he doesn't have space to set them up," says the CIO. "We'll let him play around for a while. Or someone in the humanities might have a computer music lab that she wants to experiment with. We already have one, but there might be some new facilities that will enable people to do things that our existing facilities don't allow. The faculty member could set that up in there and make it accessible to music students only, so we don't have the entire university coming around and playing with the equipment there."

The "experimentation" rooms are outfitted with ceiling-mounted DW5100U Panasonic projectors and Da-Lite Advantage Deluxe Electrol electric motorized screens at one end of the room. (The smallest of the rooms houses the 57-inch LCD5710 flat panel display from NEC) There are a range of audio-video hookups in the rooms so that students can use laptops and software that will enable them to project their work up on the screen. In addition, each room is set up for video recording of whatever transpires in the space. (The video is stored on a network drive so that students can access it at any time.) The equipment in the experimentation rooms is the same that the school has used to outfit 25 sixand eight-person group study rooms in the same building.