Date: Wednesday, 03/02/11
Time: 12:00 AM -11:59 PM CST (You can log on to the seminar anytime, all day long, on Wednesday, March 2 - whenever it's most convenient for you!)
Cost: $179 ($204 after 02/23/11)
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Dr. Peter M. Saunders
An audience favorite returns–and with a BONUS! Magna Online Seminars is bringing this popular program back for our audience members who missed it the first time around. To help you take advantage of this fact-filled seminar and explore trends in college classroom renovations, we're offering it with expanded connection options. You can log on to the seminar anytime, all day long, on Wednesday, March 2–whenever it's most convenient for you!
In Redesigning Learning Spaces to Improve Teaching and Learning, a Magna Online Seminar led by Peter Saunders, director of Oregon State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. In an interview with Academic Leader, Saunders discussed how to determine redesign priorities, the effects redesign can have, and how to coordinate redesigned learning spaces with the curriculum.
AL: How do you know when a redesign is needed?
Saunders: If faculty are beginning to try [new teaching techniques] and it’s not working, or if they request rooms somewhere else on campus, it may be time to consider a redesign. Look at the faces of students sitting in class. Do they look bored or engaged? How many students typically skip class? How are your retention rates? Can the faculty actually achieve the outcomes that the accrediting associations are telling them to achieve? If it says to get students to work collaboratively but all 400 are in fixed seating, do you write back to the accrediting agency, “I’m sorry; they can’t do that because the seats don’t move”?
AL: How might institutions prioritize their redesign plans?
Saunders: Let’s start with how much is lost in the classroom when you start to put in seats that spin and turn and so forth. In a tiered classroom you can lose anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the seats that were there before. I’ve talked to registrars at a number of schools and they say, “That’s a lot of students to lose. I can no longer put 200 students in that room. You’ve taken away 20 seats. That’s going to cost me.” But on the other side of this the number of students who drop out is much more serious than the 10, 15, or 20 percent of the seats lost [in a redesigned classroom]. You could lose 15 percent of your students in that particular room, but the students show up in another classroom. But if those students drop out completely, we lose them from every class they would have been in.
Most likely this means smaller classrooms, but you can start using the hallways and other spaces where the students can go. You can simply have chairs that roll. You can start small by putting in whiteboards and interactive whiteboards.
AL: How might you coordinate instruction and classroom redesign? What recommendations do you have for getting the most out of the new space?
Saunders: It’s not unusual to build a beautiful classroom and then have a faculty member say, “I won’t teach in that classroom because I can’t find the front of the room,” or “I’m uncomfortable with all these changes.” If you’re going to renovate the room to do these kinds of things, you need to have a training budget as part of the budget for that room. Training is essential to show faculty how they can start small using the room’s features. The key to classroom redesign is curriculum and course redesign. They go together. It’s not just learning a new trick or two, but actually thinking about how you can redesign your course so that it runs hand in hand with the kind of space you’re in.
Invite a group for one affordable fee
The registration cost for this seminar is just $179, no matter how many attend from a single site. Simply log on from a classroom or conference area to include multiple participants and receive extra value from your training investment.
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