Supporting Students and Faculty in the New Normal
As classrooms evolve to accommodate the flexibility and innovation of new learning models, it's important to provide ample training and resources for all constituents. Here are three key areas to consider.
- By Thomas Hoover, Richard Shrubb, Donna Johnson
- 07/05/22
In the liminal space of 2020 now extending into 2022, educational institutions, like many other social constructs, have gotten a facelift, moving those who were still in the prehistoric zone of Flintstonian Bedrock to the Jetson domicile of Orbit City. Some have made the leap gracefully, while others are still rambling around in a Fred Flintstone-inspired Windsor knot tie with bare feet hidden from the view of the other Zoomers. Fred was more ready for Zoom than we realized.
The classrooms of the future are now both formal and informal spaces. The teaching podium can be the kitchen table looking into the all-seeing eye of a computer camera, or it can be in the front of a classroom that, if lucky, might be filled to 50% capacity with faces whose features are muted by the necessary veils of protection. Planning for these wide variations in places and spaces creates unique challenges for IT professionals, faculty and students. Digital natives are flexible enough to be able to jump from one medium to the next with little learning curve, while the non-natives often struggle to understand how transcending time and space for course delivery through the use of technology is even possible.
To alleviate the anxiety and the learning curve for all, a focus on three key areas can help.
1) Standardizing Technology
When selecting technologies — both software and hardware — campus standardization, user-friendliness and shelf life are important criteria. Taking these facets into consideration helps unify training and minimize costs for updating and upgrading.
As classrooms have been retrofitted to meet the demands of new learning modalities, there are a few key pieces of equipment that are necessary. Speakers, cameras and microphones are needed for faculty members to be able to stream their class sessions from the classroom in live-time or record the class for future sharing. The cameras should be able to show the faculty member in the front of the classroom and also the students sitting in the room. Microphones need to be installed in such a way that they can pick up voices of students in the audience as well as hear the faculty member clearly. Because of the need to have much of this permanently installed in a classroom, classrooms also require computers and AV controller units that allow the faculty member to be able to more easily use all of the modern classroom equipment. The former days of walking into a classroom and hooking up a laptop to a VGA cable that is connected to the projector are gone.
2) Designing for New Learning Modes
Students who have continued their education through the duration of the pandemic have seen institutions and instructors seek new ways to convey course content. This includes alterations to instructional modality, course structure, content delivery, assignment alterations, personal technology access and much more. Creating fluid instructional experiences allows students to be consumers of education in a "college my way" environment, and this flexibility might be here to stay.
Hyflex is one method employed by many institutions that may stand the test of time because it is built on four pillars that are foundational to technology-mediated teaching and learning.
4 Pillars of Hyflex Learning (Beatty, 2019)
- Learner choice: Students have a choice to how they want to learn.
- Equivalency: No matter what modality students choose, they receive an equivalent learning experience.
- Reusability: Resources/artifacts from the learning experience are made available to all students.
- Accessibility: All students have the necessary technical skills and access to all resources in all participation modes.