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Education
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A futurized college campus
UConn invests in high-tech classrooms
Mar 31, 2004
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by Dan Daley
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Storrs, CT-based University of Connecticut — UConn to its students and faculty — doesn’t rank high on the Princeton Review’s notorious annual “Best 345 Party Schools” roster. But if your idea of cool is a pocket protector on your shirt instead of a lampshade on your head, then UConn might be at the top of the list.
About eight years ago, UConn embarked on an ambitious program to “futurize” its 5,000-acre campus and wire hundreds of classrooms, labs, and lecture halls. To date, working off a combined $2 billion budget approved by the state legislature and governor’s office, the university has turned 74 learning spaces into what Dick Gorham, director of the university’s Center for Instructional Media & Technology, called “mediated” classrooms — media-equipped learning environments.
Over the next several years, more than 100 classroom spaces will become mediated, at the rate of about 10 per year, providing high-tech teaching tools for instructors, connectivity for students, and a Web-based extension for the school’s growing distance learning program.
Up To Speed
Depending on the size of the learning space, classrooms will feature LCD or larger plasma screens. Every computer and display is connected via a Web CT server running 100BaseT Ethernet connections, stemming from a central server drive array that is segmented to accommodate long-term and temporary files for various course syllabi. Files are moved around using FTP, and certain key software packages, such as Microsoft Office and Netscape Navigator, provide a common software base.
Lecture halls and other large spaces have audio support, mainly in the form of sound reinforcement via Peavey ceiling-mounted speakers and, in some cases, PA stacks on the lectern stage. Ceiling microphones are hung in certain lecture halls for audio during distance learning sessions. And a combination of hard-wired lectern and Sony wireless microphone systems are also provided.
“The wireless and wired microphones are a good example of how we decided from the outset of this project to adapt the technology to the pedagogy, not the other way around,” Gorham explained. “The faculty decides how they want to teach, and we find the technologies that can achieve that. In the case of microphones, some professors or instructors will want to stay connected to their podiums, either because it’s their style or because they need to work various displays and graphics. Others will want to engage the students on a closer basis, using the wireless to roam the room. The key is, we didn’t want the technology tail wagging the larger educational dog.”
But the whiz-bang aspect of high-tech education has its more quotidian side, and it’s an equally complex one. The Center for Instructional Media & Technology has a staff of six technicians who maintain the growing technology infrastructure at UConn. Barely enough, said Gorham.
The schedule calls for each of the 74 mediated spaces to come off-line for one hour a week for maintenance. This has led to a mandate to minimize the types of equipment used, although the tech staff still faces equipment from an array of manufacturers including Mitsubishi, NEC, Sony, and Sharp for video alone.
Looking Forward
Further, marrying education with technology puts the school on the same slippery technology slope that other high-tech institutions are on, in that they need to constantly revise the hardware and software of the system. When the project began eight years ago, for example, high-tech was a four-head VCR with remote; today, those VCRs are being augmented (but not supplanted, because so much teaching material still resides on VHS) by DVD.
“We figure the technology upgrade/replacement cycle is about five years for the AV equipment and three years for computers,” Gorham estimated.
In terms of design, Gorham said the mandate was to create rooms that had similar operational characteristics — the same AMX touchscreen controls, for instance, so that instructors could switch rooms if necessary and not miss a beat by having to figure out the remote.
Acoustics in the newly constructed buildings on campus were integrated into the design, while older classrooms, which have lower ceilings and parallel wall surfaces, have had their acoustics augmented with baffles and acoustical tiles. The center’s own technicians worked with the various systems designers and contractors on CAD/CAM systems to develop the physical and technology systems designs for the classrooms.
Student feedback is also accommodated, and will become more of a focus in coming years as distance learning becomes a bigger part of the technology infrastructure’s responsibility. This reflects how distance learning as a market sector has grown tremendously in the last decade.
The next major leap in the school’s technology infrastructure will be some type of wireless network, which allows data transfer interaction between the instructors’ computers and students’ laptops. This could be the ultimate in note taking, but Gorham has also foreseen some potential pitfalls of wireless, specifically security issues.
“There is the possibility of someone driving up next to the campus and intercepting teaching via wireless,” he said, as well as the potential for gaining access to exam questions and answers. “That’s a concern throughout higher education. What we’ll need is a much more robust wireless system. I’m a big proponent of wireless, but not until we can be reasonably sure we can make it secure.”
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