Educause 2017, Day 4

The final day of the conference started off with the University of Kentucky discussing its findings for their first year of having 17 active learning classrooms across campus. Interestingly enough, it appears that they did not worry about faculty development ahead of time but simply assigned faculty to the new and redesigned classrooms.  Sometimes faculty did not know they were teaching in this new space until just a couple of weeks before classes started. They do have an impressive number of 42% of their students having had a class in a TEAL space during this first year. Their discussion of stakeholders did not include faculty and students, which I also found surprising. They used surveys and classroom observation with the Minnesota observation tool and some interviews to gather data, also focusing on final grades.

One takeaway for me was the following up with individual faculty who participated in surveys to ensure that the lines of communication stay open by acknoledging their concerns. Their data included all sections of all courses, with historical data, to ensure for the final grades that a good comparison could be established.  This analysis did show that even though not all faculty used the spaces well, students nevertheless improved grades, and, possibly more important, some underserviced student groups saw an improvement in retention in the second year.

Indiana University showed off its concept of Reality Studios - up to 25 implementations of virtual reality stations that are available to students outside of class, making it easier for them to take the time and fully immerse themselves into the VR.  In conjunction with their MOSAIC initiative of learning spaces, they are now taking advantage of the relatively inexpensive hand held VR devices after 20 years of more expensive VR development and display.  They reminded us that a lot of VR is run through the STEAM platform, leading to possible problems purchasing licenses for the university. Some of the VR examples were Anatomy:  The Body VR Journey inside a cell; Apollo 11, Geography, Music:  Soundstage; Astronomy:  Titans of Space; and finally a simple Media playback tool:  Simple VRVideo Player.  The future will bring mobile VR as right now you need to still stay tethered to the computer that is processing the VR.

Temple Grandin

The conference closed with Temple Grandin discussing Developing Students who have Different Minds.

Key takeaways there are to remember that Algebra should not be used to deny students who are visual thinkers access to the sciences, and that our insistence on providing students on the spectrum special accommodations without giving them truly different ways to learn, through, for example, hands-on internships, is depriving all of us amazing opportunities as it means that potential innovation does not get the stimulus it needs to thrive. In addition, she pointed out that overspecialization leads to a loss in creativity.