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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for fall of 2002 and to this session on Smart Classrooms�Linking Design Elements to Effective Teaching and Learning. You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you with the support of the CREN member institutions and the Sextant Group, technology consultants to higher education. Let me welcome Howard Strauss, our Tech Talk technology anchor who is coming to us today from Princeton, I believe.

HS: Rainy Princeton today.

JB: Rainy Princeton! Okay. Welcome, Howard.

HS: Thank you, Judith. I�m Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today we�ll engage our guest experts, Bruce Taggart and Darryl Davis, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about smart classrooms and we�ll ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don�t get to your questions during the webcast, we�ll provide an answer in the webcast archive. We keep pouring piles of expensive multimedia equipment into our classrooms and declare them to be �smart� classrooms. We want our classrooms to be smart because the flood of students entering our colleges, many of whom are non-traditional students, demand that we find some better ways to teach them the increasingly complex and rapidly changing material that they need to master. Many universities have hidden the fact that they are actually building smart classrooms, calling them �electronic-enhanced� classrooms, multimedia classrooms, or learning laboratories. Once you call the smart classroom �smart,� there are some embarrassing questions that will be asked. For example, why does it cost more money to make a classroom smart than to send a teenager through four years of an Ivy League college? Or the question, if a classroom is so smart, why is it that a Nobel Laureate in physics is unable to figure out how to use it? The goal of a smart classroom is simply to make learning better, more effective and more efficient but it takes much more than even the smartest classroom to do that. First one needs to hire people who are enthusiastic about teaching and have the skills to do it effectively. A first grade teacher teaching addition to six year old children gets more training in pedagogy than a tenured professor teaching advanced calculus. Once you have great teachers, you need to train them in online pedagogy, multimedia course design and the use of course development tools and, of course, the facilities in smart classrooms. Then you have to give them the tools and facilities to allow them to put together compelling, dynamic, entertaining material that will kindle the innate joy of learning and discovery that is in all of us. And you�ll need a proactive support group to help educators every step of the way. We can�t just build smart classrooms and declare learning nirvana victory. We have to cultivate smart teachers and learners and we have to give them the tools they need to be successful. We cannot get lost in just throwing technology at this problem because the technology is so fascinating and a course infused with multimedia somehow seems better than one that is dull. There are no dull courses, only dull teachers. Thermodynamics, differential equations and even accounting can be compelling in the hands of a skilled professor with just a blackboard and a piece of chalk. Give that professor the training, tools and support to do presentations even just equal to the quality of the evening news and students will be totally energized by the material, rather than just trying to get an acceptable grade. Of course, most learning occurs outside the few hours that students spend in classrooms, which raises the interesting question of how a smart classroom can improve learning when there are no classrooms. There are many other puzzling issues that we need to explore. Since we can�t sneak off to our own smart classroom to learn about this issue, we�ll have to rely on Bruce and Darryl to tell us how to raise the IQ�s of our classrooms and explain to us why students, faculty and staff should not be the only smart things on campus on today�s Tech Talk. Judith?

JB: Thank you, Howard, and as we�re talking about these interesting questions, I�d like to think about the fact that while the smart classrooms surround us, we still have to think about the fact that all learning really occurs in the brain and that�s where we�re trying today to focus on linking those technology elements within our smart classrooms to how we really can improve teaching and learning. So with that, let�s welcome our first guest for today, Darryl Davis from East Carolina University. Darryl is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Distributed Education and Academic Information Technology. Darryl also works with faculty support efforts in integrating technology across both traditional and non-traditional educational environments. Darryl has also been instrumental in the support of more than 25 online degree and certificate programs. Do check out the website for ECU�s e-learning initiatives for more on how East Carolina is organizationally structured in this area, which is always a challenge. Welcome, Darryl.

DD: Well, good afternoon. Glad to be here.

JB: And you�re coming to us from where, Williamsburg today?

DD: Yes, I�m spending a little time in Williamsburg today.

HS: So we�re going to get some colonial type answers [inaudible].

JB: There we go! Smart classrooms in colonial Williamsburg! Good! Let�s welcome our second guest, Bruce Taggart from Lehigh University. Bruce currently serves as Vice Provost for Library and Technology Services. In this position, Bruce is responsible for directing and managing university libraries, technology services, distance education and faculty development. And I notice that both of you have almost the same scope of responsibilities, so maybe we�re seeing some consensus in this are. Prior to coming to Lehigh, Bruce was the Executive Director for Academic and Administrative Computing at Portland State University in Oregon. Prior to that was the Director of the University Computing Center at the University of Connecticut. Welcome to Tech Talks, Bruce.

BT: Thank you, Judith, nice to be here!

JB: Great, okay. We�ve got somebody�unfortunately we�ve got a little cough today.

HS: Yes, I do.

JB: Who�s not feeling well? Is that you, Howard?

HS: I�m just feeling fine. I think it�s just one of these things that happens as soon as we start to do Tech Talk!

JB: Okay, great! All right.

HS: Okay, Bruce, maybe you can start off by telling us briefly what a smart classroom really is. What do we think of when we think of smart classroom?

BT: Well, I think in general most people, when they think of smart classrooms, are thinking about electronically enhanced, basically with computer access, a fixed computer, Ethernet access for like a docking station for a laptop and a computer projection system. I think that�s fundamentally the simple smart classroom definition.

HS: And what about higher-end things? Is there kind of a hierarchy or a continuum of smart classrooms?

BT: Oh, sure!

HS: As we add things, what kind of things are we adding?

BT: When you�re adding things, you�re adding certainly cost [?] and then could be multiple projection systems, high speed networking access for doing Internet 2 video, say. DVD, CD, smart boards. All those type of things again extend the technology capacity of the classroom.

DD: Also add to that, I think, the wireless interaction that students may be able to take advantage of to [inaudible] themselves into the room.

HS: And Darryl, how are faculty using these classrooms once we put these things in? What kind of things do we see that are different than when we put them in regular classrooms/

DD: Well, we�re in a state of evolution. There are real champions and pioneers out there who probably push the limits of the technology and are willing to go very live with downloading data, but I think by most accounts, you will find people using projection systems that are greatly enhanced with graphics and other things, with archive materials that they have developed, maybe some web links. And are just probably expanding on more traditional projection kind of technologies with presentations that are a little better refined and are also, then, maybe available to the students even outside of the classroom so that we continue to be smart when we leave.

HS: What kind of extra work do faculty have to do to do something in a classroom? It seems like they can�t just take their talk and chalk thing, pop into a smart classroom and expect that it�ll work.

DD: I think there�s an advantage here to perhaps putting a little more effort into developing some higher end graphics and some additional quality into the type of animation or whatever you might bring to a lesson or a set of instruction. And then perhaps being able to reuse some of that from time to time, certainly making it available to students offline as well as online, and then spend your time on developing interaction with the students instead of just repeating the process every time you do a lecture.

HS: Okay, we have a question from CUNY College from�I may pronounce the first name incorrectly, but we�ll give it a try. It�s T-Z-V-I. Zvee, I think, Maxon. And she wonders�she says, �How do you get instructors who�ve been doing the same thing for 30 years to adapt to these new technologies?�

DD: Well, I think that what you have to do is have example. There are always those who do a wonderful job at different things and you need to as an administrator�which I am�put these kind of folks in front of others and give them a chance to mentor and work with other faculty and provide the example of how good a job you can do with some things.

HS: What about training of faculty? What kind of training do each of you do? Bruce?

BT: Well, I think that�s obviously one of the keys to having successful electronic or smart classrooms. You know, the faculty hopefully want to teach better and if they teach in certain areas, whether it be science or engineering or education, if they can see some of the visualization possibilities to teach a concept better, and then they have to think about their overall instructional design. What are their student learning outcomes in various disciplines? And then how can they map technology into those student learning outcomes? Again, the question gets back to let�s just not throw technology or take our notes and put them into a PowerPoint. How do you build in animations and simulations, to engage the student as a learner? So the challenge, then, is how do faculty work with experts in the field of instructional design to build in multimedia? So at Lehigh, we have a whole range of things from a teaching and learning with technology roundtable, seminars, workshops, one-on-one training with kind of a distributed model. We have instructional designers in all of our colleges and we�re also kicking off, this fall semester, a learning center, a teaching resource learning center which faculty can go to get assistance from a technology faculty fellow who is taking one class or I�m buying out one of his classes to be a peer mentor to other faculty. We have a prototype electronic classroom. We had kind of referred to that question before, of how do you throw a faculty member into an electronic classroom if they�ve never tested one. So we�re testing a prototype of high end equipment the faculty can go in and drill and practice and test things out to see what works and what doesn�t work. So it�s not one simple straight answer, but there�s multiple ways a faculty can be part of a developmental process to teach better.

JB: Bruce, is there something special about the prototype classroom or is it the same as what you have on campus?

BT: The prototype will probably be more enhanced than we have on campus. We�ll have the fundamental set there of a projection system, a PC, a DVD player, VCR, but this will also have multiple screens in it. It will have the ability for us to test and drill and practice some of the latest in technologies that, as we build more of these, faculty will say, �I like that,� �I don�t like that.� So we�ll learn ourselves. We�re looking at this as kind of being an incubator of technology classrooms.

JB: Interesting!

HS: How do you market to faculty to get them to do this? It looks like it�s a big commitment of time and I know that faculty usually are reluctant to commit time for anything except their research and maybe a little on teaching. BT and

DD: Well�

BT: Go ahead, Darryl.

DD: I was going to say, the biggest way that you do this is most faculty are interested in improving what they do.

BT: I agree!

DD: And you simply find those good examples that they would say, �Hey, I could apply something like this in what I�m doing and do a better job of it.� And so that�s the number one enticement. But of course, providing other support things like the training and perhaps some time to learn is also critical.

BT: Yeah, and I think having that visible technical support and instructional support within the college and then have a center for learning and teaching to serve as, again, support. I mean, faculty don�t want to be out there on the edge without the support and without having the training to be successful in the classroom.

HS: Okay, one of the things that people keep asking is what does it cost and how do you pay for it? What does it cost to have a smart classroom? And I understand that there�s a continuum of these things, but what does it cost for a basic one and what does it cost for a fancier one?

BT: Well, we just completed two years of a five year cycle to upgrade. We hope to get to about 75 or 80% of our classrooms to be electronic classrooms so there�s not this bottleneck to try and get into a classroom, but they range from $18,000 for a minimum�

HS: What�s in an $18,000 classroom?

BT: Projection system, faculty podium which includes a PC, Ethernet access and possibly DVD and VCR, but not with a touch screen panel for each use. So the basic one is just a multimedia and the computing.

DD: And we�ve actually gone even simpler than that with our very basic at ECU. We have some mobile units that include a CPU and a projector. All of our classrooms do have Ethernet connectivity and we�ve been able to bring those in as low as $5,800 to $6,000. And then in terms of the long term support, we do buy extended warranty, looking at a life of about three years. So we�re not having to put too much of an overhead infrastructure in for technical support in terms of repair.

JB: Darryl, in those classrooms, then, the faculty bring in their laptops and just hook in?

DD: No, actually these units have a CPU built in and they can just go to the network and download their presentation or they can flop in a CD or a disk drive or a zip drive.

JB: Okay.

HS: Tzvi Maxon had a follow-up question right in her first question and that�s why I was asking you about money because she says, �How do you provide for maintenance and backup?� How do you pay for that? It seems like when you�re budgeting for these things, you have to budget for all those things. And she also says, �What kind of resources does it take to keep all these things operating once you have a bunch of them?� She says that some of them break and you have to get out there and fix them.

BT: Well, you�ve got to be up front about the cost with some type of life cycle methodology for replacement of media in the classroom. You have to, again, position yourself for additional funds as you expand the number of classrooms. That�s the key. Easier said than done, but there is a cost. The good news is, the mean time failures of a lot of the media that we�re putting in now, a couple of years ago it�d be 24, 26 months. Now we�re looking at 36 to 48 months. So we�re buying some time.

DD: Right. The equipment is much more robust and we�re finding that with extended warranties, you can take care of intermediate repairs, but you still have to stage in replacement of equipment on a 36 to 48 month cycle.

JB: What about the maintenance, though, to make certain that everything is working all the time, so that you don�t have to have people running around the campus solving problems? Is there any automated way of doing that?

DD: Some of the new networkable projectors and systems, yes, there is remote access for troubleshooting and testing and assessment of the equipment. So you could have a mission control once all of these are fitted out.

BT: But fundamentally, it�s a technical media support staff and students.

JB: And students, okay.

BT: And students! Of course, students.

DD: Absolutely.

HS: When we put together one of these smart classrooms, what kind of things are we hoping to achieve, other than to make something look pretty in a classroom?

DD: I think you�re trying to get the student more deeply involved in the information that they�re looking at, they�re hearing, and also to spur them to keep digging. Of course, you�re obviously producing something that may be reusable to them so they�re able to go in and refresh even beyond courses. At the next level, when we have the wireless networks in those rooms, you can have direction interaction to students in the lesson with each other and with the faculty member as well.

BT: Yeah, I think the key is trying to engage students in the learning process. I think it�s to allow some flexibility in learning. I had a geology faculty tell me in a large classroom, the difference from traditional methods to electronic methods is he sees the students� faces. And I said, �What do you mean by that?� And he said, �Well, in my former class of 200, 250, they were just always copiously taking notes and their heads were down and they weren�t paying attention to my graphs or my overheads or whatever.� But now he has three projection systems with an animation and a simulation and a real time monitoring link to the US Geological Survey sites, they�re engaged and they ask questions and they interact. He says it�s totally more engaged learning environment, so I think that�s what we�re after.

DD: Yeah.

BT: To get students actively engaged.

DD: They don�t have to write down that funky scientific term.

BT: Hopefully, they�re learning.

DD: They know they can get it later.

JB: You mentioned geology. Is there another�are there any other disciplines that really like�you said three projection systems, three screens?

BT: Yeah, in, as you might imagine, some of the larger undergraduate classes but it�s in all disciplines. Biology, chemistry is amazingly well suited for multimedia. Geology. And especially with the web. You can go to real time sites and great resources.

DD: Even art appreciation.

BT: Art appreciation is a great use, especially with two projection systems. You can look at Salvador Dali at 18 and in his sixties, so you could�

HS: What do these high end kind of smart classrooms cost? You said that you could do kind of a basic one for 18 or 20 thousand dollars.

DD: We�re sort of going for an ultimate one in our new technology and science classroom building. It�s called a global classroom and it has a very reconfigurable setup and it�s designed to support laboratory type activities. And the technology equipment in that room alone is about $600,000.

JB: Just the equipment, did you say, Darryl?

HS: Yeah, I think we just lost a bunch of listeners.

DD: And Internet [inaudible]

BT: Yeah, I think we did, too.

DD: And in some ways, this is like a black box theatre. It can support as many as four classes at once or a large section of 150 at one time.

JB: Oh, okay, so it�s more than one classroom. It would be a wonderful area to do good computing for some applications in the very high end.

JB: I think actually, to encourage our folks to go the website, we�ve got a picture of that, I think, up at a link up there.

DD: And there�s an excellent link back to an article that references this type of classroom that�s in the quarterly this time.

JB: Yeah, right, talking about the black box theatre. Okay.

HS: You can show this to your administration and tell them what you want!

DD: We were talking about funding for that this week!

JB: What about�600,000, that does sound like it�s really at the other end of the scale. What about one of these classrooms with the three projectors, three screens, Bruce, that you were mentioning? What are those running?

BT: Well, at Lehigh we just completed a project for a high end classroom, electronic classroom, and it has two rear projection systems in it, a very high-end faculty podium, the ability to control in the room the two projection systems, the PC, the VCR, the DVD, and it�s also a distance ed classroom so it has the ability to have satellite downlink to it and it�s also an Internet 2-ready classroom that we can do Internet 2 video. That�s roughly $225,000, $250,000, in that range. But it actually has three projection systems in it. You can see the classroom at a distance on a rear flat screen plasma panel. But that has been effective in our inter-institutional type of future. How are you going to use these classrooms? We have a materials science consortium at Lehigh and we have this new class in biomedical materials that we team teach with Carnegie Mellon, Lehigh, Penn and also the Penn State Harrisburg Medical Center. So it�s actually four or five locations, all dealing with the same subject matter of biomedical materials. Now to me, that is a very exciting, engaged, new type of virtual classroom that this setting is allowing to happen.

JB: So you�re really going outside the walls. We have�while we�re on physical elements within the classroom�we have a question coming in from Philip Kerrman from Wooster, College of Wooster, and he�s asking specifically�he wants to know whether document cameras such as Elmos are very useful and also the touch screen control units.

BT: At Lehigh, we�re using both and the Elmos and the WolfVisions which allow you to freeze a frame on an overhead are very effective for doing comparisons. You put a material down and you cut it up and you freeze it and then you put another one down and you freeze it up on the projection systems so you can do a comparison. So overheads are very effective and�what was the second part of that one?

JB: The [inaudible] control units?

DD: Touch screen.

BT: Oh, yeah, the touch screen, we�re experimenting with those and I think faculty are just starting to get a hold on those because they�re so used to being at the podium. But we�re starting to experiment with those and I think they do have a future, without a doubt.

DD: Yeah, and the touch screens are going to be a PDA kind of environment that allow you a lot of different capabilities there. For one thing it does, it allows you a very simple process, in many cases without having to get back into keyboards and make commands or whatever to do.

BT: It looks like the smart boards, if you have the ability to put up a graph or a chart and then go up and annotate it with a red stylus pen or whatever, it�s very effective.

DD: You can also think of the Elmos and the document cameras as offering another advantage. Let�s do a pre-chem lab or something for a pre-biology lab where you can actually have a very large image up of something you�re manipulating or doing by hand and it is more effective, I think, than trying to have the students look at it through a pure video or through some sort of captured animation.

HS: Since we�re talking about labs, are people building smart labs as well as smart classrooms? And if they are, what are they doing in them?

DD: Yes, we�ve had in operation a smart lab at ECU for probably about three and a half years in two of our areas. One has been in support of the manufacturing lab in the online masters of industrial tech. The other supports our networking folks in the masters degree there in network and network security. The network security is fairly simple. That server that exists for each student on campus that they access via the web and we do some firewalling to keep them from doing any damage to the campus backbone, but they actually can do anything to that server you can do to the one in your back room except walk up and take it apart physically. In the manufacturing area, we have used fairly innovative technology to allow the students to actually run C and C machining equipment online, have video feedback that can load, change tools, things of this nature, through interactive software. So it�s not just simulation, they actually do see this. And we�ve had remote in from Australia to Greenville, North Carolina, so we know that distance is not a problem there.

JB: So actually it�s a smart lab in that students really don�t have to physically be there.

DD: That�s exactly right.

JB: Interesting!

HS: Do you see this smart classroom technology�I mean, the way you�re describing the smart lab and the smart classroom, it seems like to some degree, this technology is actually bringing labs and classrooms closer together. If you don�t actually have to be there and touch stuff, you could do it in a classroom.

BT: Exactly.

DD: Oh, absolutely, and of course, this will bring with a maturity of simulation and other things, there are activities that you can really shorten some learning curves and allow students to experiment with a million dollar microscope instead of the little dinky ones you have in the lab. I mean, you can replicate this and then when they do get their hands on something, they don�t have to spend as much time with learning curves.

BT: And I think that�s an important point, too, they are merging the smart labs and the smart classrooms so you can leverage your technology resources and have your students gain access to at another institution maybe some very high end equipment that you can�t have access on your campus, and vice versa. So I think it really is leveraging your technology resources.

HS: And so that would mean the student could even do some of the lab or maybe even all of some labs in their dorm room or in the student center.

BT: Right.

DD: Our medical school has actually developed online pathology labs.

BT: Yeah, we have some smart labs�

HS: So people sit there in the student center and look at pathology slides?

DD: Oh, yeah, much better than you can see under a microscope.

JB: While they�re eating!

HS: No one sits near them, right?

DD: Well, they�re med students. They�d cut your heart out!

JB: Oh, dear!

HS: We have lots more questions here. We have a question from Malcolm Brown at Dartmouth College and he says, �Do you know of any published studies in the area of assessing the effectiveness of smart classroom technology?� I think the question is, how do we know these things work?

BT: At Portland State a few years ago under a FIPSI grant, I�m not sure if it was published or widely distributed, but Nancy Paren and John Ruder�Nancy Paren was a psychologist and John Ruder was a biologist�and they looked at the effectiveness of technology in large classrooms and they did, I believe it�s a four year longitudinal study with a control group and test group and the early indications were that there was no significant difference, but there were some high correlations. Certain student groups did better than they did in other courses, like in psychology or chemistry or biology. So there�s that one under FIPSI. That�s about the only one I know of that was really a study.

HS: Darryl?

BT: And not just a survey.

DD: Well, a year or two ago, I happened to be cruising through something and I ran up against the No Significant Difference website. And there seems to be tons of all kinds of studies from everywhere that point out the no significant difference, and then there are also Significant Difference websites. And I think part of the problem in this area, we are in sort of a new area and it�s also very dependent upon how the instructor is able to congeal a class together to make effective use of the technology. It can be butchered or it can be done in such an effective manner that the students say, �Wow! Give me this back in a hurry. I want to be back in this kind of environment.� But if they bomb with it, it certainly stinks. So it�s very incumbent on us to have the instructors well-prepared to take full advantage of the technology and do a good job with it.

HS: Okay�

JB: Do we�

HS: Go ahead.

JB: Do we know of anything that we�ve put in the classrooms that really don�t work? Rather than we have kind of a baseline, I guess, of stuff, but is there anything you had put in the classrooms and found that, man, we should never have done that?

HS: Besides students! No.

JB: Besides students, right.

DD: Well, we tried early on an approach to using some large television screens before the projectors really matured and that didn�t work too great.

JB: Okay.

DD: You know, we stumbled through things and you find it occasionally does not work.

JB: And what about audio?

DD: That is so dependent on the facility and also what�s next door to you that it�s an exact science of its own. This is an area, if you�re doing large classrooms or you�re renovating buildings where you have sound problems, you really need audio engineering consulting help to design systems that put the sound where you want it. But it�s something that�s very zoneable today, where you can have very low levels of volume but can hear in every area that you want to hear and not in the others. So this is an area that does require considerable expertise to conquer.

HS: Okay, Malcolm wondered�Malcolm Brown also wondered if either of you have tried to measure the success or effectiveness of smart classrooms yourself. Have either of you tried to do that? DD and

BT: Well�

DD: Go ahead.

BT: I don�t know about a scientific measurement instrument, but�

HS: Oh, he said �informal.� I didn�t read the word �informal� but he said have you tried any informal measurements?

BT: Yes, I mean, we constantly survey faculty and students on an annual basis on what has worked and what hasn�t worked and we have a number of questions that we consistently ask faculty on an annual basis, of how are the electronic classrooms working or not working?

HS: And what do you hear?

BT: We hear they are more effective, you know, for them to teach. We hear some of the bad aspects of it, too, related to maybe like lighting or not all rooms, as we�ve been talking, are created equal. I mean, some have some deficiencies on projection system or laptops or whatever that I think we�re all struggling with across the country. How do we make some parity in some of our classrooms so certain faculty don�t get stuck in classrooms that want to teach with technology that aren�t up to a standard level?

HS: Are there things you�re being asked for, that faculty come in and say, �Yeah, this is pretty nice but what I really need, or the next thing I�d like�� Do you see the next thing you�re going to do in these classrooms?

DD: Yeah, and I think most of the next thing goes back to where Bruce was going earlier, is that support with refining the production that the faculty member is actually developing for a class�in other words, putting a lot of energy and effort into getting quality material produced. You know, the technology�most of them are familiar enough with it, but you know, they do like additional things. Here comes the white board or some other things that they can capture, but generally most of them are now looking for assistance in refining their product to take better advantage of the technology.

JB: Hmm, interesting!

HS: Cynthia Carter-Ching at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has a couple questions we covered but there�s a couple we haven�t. And one of the questions we haven�t is she says, �Do more than a few professors use these smart classrooms? And do you understand why the ones who don�t use them, don�t use them?�

DD: Well, there is mixed demand. In some academic units, every faculty member does use, wants to use. And other units, there�s a very small minority of folks who are even interested. I think the biggest barrier is complexity of the systems. In other words, the difficulty of the faculty member walking in and not understanding which cable goes where or how to get it turned on effectively. And a few minutes of losing or a few times of losing five or ten minutes at the beginning of class to get something up and running will be so discouraging you don�t get them back very easily. So that kind of tech support and training up front is quite critical and that�s probably the biggest detriment for many folks is overcoming that reluctance.

BT: Yeah, I think we�re at a point now where technology has grown and matured and there�s a lot of very good examples of faculty and then peers seeing how faculty are using technology in the classroom, so I�d say a majority of faculty are using at least computer projection and the web as part of their teaching. And then others are still on the edge and as we provide, again, more easy to use classrooms with touch screen panels�you press the computer and the computer goes on, you press the projector and the projector goes on on this touch screen. They�re becoming more easy to use, and then if you provide this teaching-learning center where they can prototype, test and then bring it into the classroom, we�re again going to see the second and third phases of adopters.

HS: What percentage of your classrooms have at least a computer projector and an Ethernet connection in them? Bruce?

BT: We�re probably at about 65%.

HS: Okay, so that means that 40% of the classes sort of couldn�t be in a smart classrooms. I mean, so a lot of faculty who could potentially teach in a smart classroom just can�t get one because not all your classrooms are done that way.

BT: Right.

HS: Is your goal to get 100%?

BT: No, our goal will probably be to get about 80 to 90% of our seats to be in smart technology classrooms.

HS: Why not 100%?

BT: Because again, I�m not sure you�re going to get your return on your investment in certain classrooms. It�s be nice to say that all of them have network accessibility, but to put in a projection system in others and maybe some small seminar rooms and some other type rooms, I don�t think we�re looking at that. Again, we�re looking at the most significant return on investment that we can get in the next three to five years.

JB: Are you using carts at all? I know that was often a popular way of solving the problem of reaching 100% of the classrooms because you really weren�t equipping all of them, but it was available.

BT: Yeah, at Lehigh, I don�t think we�re visioning using carts.

JB: Okay.

HS: Darryl, what�s your experience?

DD: Well, we�re probably at about 35 to 40% and it�s going to be very difficult to go out to 100. We have 2,000 faculty and 20,000 students so it�s a longer term vision to think of 100% equipped. We�re going to be a 100% wireless network campus probably by the end of this academic year. We are upfitting some rooms in a fairly high end manner, and some in a fairly standard manner. We will use a limited number of carts to add flexibility to those sort of general type classrooms where you can just roll down from one room to another and everything�s very similar. And it�s a quick and simple way to deploy and get the faculty member his favorite classroom and the technology.

JB: Right. We�ve got an awful lot of questions coming in. I�m trying to look at one. I think there�s one here that kind of wraps in the maintenance�some of the maintenance questions, etc., and also the number of classrooms that we can afford to do this. And the question is coming from Albert Berglund from Oregon State University and he asks the question of how many FTE do you devote to support each smart classroom? For example, do you have one FTE per every three rooms or every four rooms? Who�d like to take that one?

HS: Bruce will!

JB: Bruce!

BT: Bruce will! I don�t know if I have an answer for that. I think again, for the support issue, we have a couple people in Network and also a couple people in Media who also�so it�s a hard number to come up with, considering you have Computing, you have Media and then you also have Instructional Designers. All in a sense support the smart classrooms.

DD: I think we�re in the same boat and in some of the academic units where they have gotten ahead of the curve and purchased their own equipment, they�re the champion faculty members or their tech support people and you always have lab people in the sciences and other areas that are technician types and there have been a lot of people who have, I think, adopted the systems to help keep them running. It�s hard to track the FTE.

JB: Okay, so they really do adopt and kind of help manage it from that perspective.

DD: Yes.

HS: Umm�

JB: Howard, we�ve got a lot of questions. You want to pull one up?

HS: Why don�t you do Albert�s other question? Or I�ll do it! I sort of like this question.

JB: Okay.

HS: Albert Berglund, we�re splitting you up here. We�re doing one of your questions each person here, but Albert also asks, �What security measures are you using for the room and the room�s equipment?�

BT: That�s a great question! At Lehigh, we just had an issue this past summer with some security issues. In certain downtimes, we�re having the rooms locked and then during the prime time academic day, they�re open. But we�re also using very physical�at this point in time�security devices, especially for projection systems.

HS: What do you mean by �physical security devices�? I mean, aren�t your projection systems mounted so that nobody can get to them anyway?

BT: Well, some of them are ceiling mounted so we figured they�re pretty high up, they�re going to be safe. But we found that not to be true.

HS: Somebody got the ceiling mounted ones?

BT: Oh, yes!

DD: Um-hum.

BT: And Darryl�s saying the same thing.

HS: You must have taller students than we have!

BT: No, they�re ingenious or somebody is, you know?

JB: Oh, dear, that�s not a good sign, is it?

HS: Yeah.

BT: They�re not our students, that�s the key. They�re somewhere�

DD: The networkable projectors, there�s a possibility of adding system type guarding and also you can add, well, I guess, shrieking alarms.

BT: Yeah, that�s what�

DD: You can have cable devices. Many of the projectors now come with very specialized fasteners so you�ve got to have a very peculiar wrench or screwdriver to be able to detach them, so that�s a good detriment as well. And it�s not much of a protection to keep from losing it, but people can�t use it, there are password things that you can do with the projectors as well so that folks can�t get into them.

HS: In sort of trying to manage these things and pay for them, is anybody using charge-backs? Are you folks using charge-backs?

DD: It doesn�t fit our business model. We�re a state supported university with some fairly interesting things in our budget that limit what we can do.

BT: And at Lehigh there are no charge-backs and none envisioned. Again, the charge-back over the years didn�t seem to work all that well with centralized computing. I don�t know how it�d work here either. We want to �incent� people to use these things and to get them greater utilization of these classrooms.

DD: It�s been our experience, if you do a charge-back, they get really�

BT: It�s a barrier.

DD: --control it themselves and they wind up buying and doing it themselves rather than paying you to do it.

HS: Okay, and you�re not even thinking about charge-backs for people outside the university? I mean, only groups inside the university can use that equipment?

DD: That�s right.

BT: Yeah, I mean, if we have summer conferences or anything, it�s part of the overall conference fee, so there is that charge-back but that�s very small.

HS: Okay, Thomas Wise at Wisconsin wonders if you�ve considered outsourcing service and maintenance.

DD: Well, in a sense, we have used extended warranty for some of the heavier service kind of things, next-day replacement and that sort of thing. And I mean, that�s just a self defense mechanism. You can�t have experts in eight or nine different projection systems that are spread over three years of technology. So that�s the down-and-dirty quick, but we have not looked at yet an external resource for doing a broader comprehensive approach to this.

BT: I think it�s something to look at as we grow larger and larger. I don�t think we�d reduce our current staff at all, but as we grow, maybe another ten or 20% of classrooms and we�re looking at something with the Lehigh Valley Independent Colleges to do maybe a consortial contract with a local media vendor, to support our classrooms on like five or six campuses.

HS: Right. Okay, we have another question, a question from Craig Agneburg at Northern Kentucky University and Craig asks how you are all handling the ADA accessibility for faculty in the smart classrooms. I wonder if we can just extend the question and talk about how we work with smart classrooms when it comes to accessibility for both faculty and students. Darryl?

DD: Well, we are�we have a fairly active ADA compliance unit on our campus. We serve a large number of folks who are deaf and we have a few who are visually impaired. And so we do have assistance in developing materials that are enhanced in several ways. Our instructional technology consultants that are assigned to each of the schools in the college have backup to assist faculty when do run in�but we typically are doing more when we have a student in a class. We put a lot of energy on it. We are not trying to do everything to be totally ADA compliant but when it becomes an issue, we will make adjustments to make it work.

BT: Yeah, and that�s the same situation at Lehigh. We have an area within out Student Affairs area that handles most of the requests for ADA assistance and then our instructional designers do know about some tools that they can use like Drag and Dictate or other type of�what do they call it? Technologies which assist people with physical challenges.

JB: Okay, we�ve talked a bit about assessing classrooms and whether there�s any studies to do this and David Brown�I just want him to know that we haven�t forgotten his question here. He asks two questions, one which we�ve answered, but then the second one asks for �can you suggest how we might go about assessing the success of smart classrooms?� I think we�ve said that it�s really hard to do. I mean, is there something that either of you thinks we might be able to do to see just which components of these classrooms really do lend value to our environments?

DD: Well, I think we�re getting to a point now where we have enough deployment to begin to have meaningful methodology for sampling meaningful class sizes and I think it�s just a very simple way, simply an approach�what we normally do at this stage. We�re going to have to do some control and some test groups and we�re going to have to apply some scientific standards to evaluate, if that�s what we really want to do. On the other hand, we�re finding faculty and students giving us such positive feedback that a faculty member doing one of these classes is not really wanting to go back to the old way of delivering just to get the data.

BT: Exactly! I mean, so what group do you put in either group that�s going to be, like, disparately treated with not having access to or not having the visualization and simulation and the animation? It�s a tough question. I mean, a lot of the survey stuff we�re doing is feedback from students and feedback from faculty, kind of like a continuous improvement cycle of is it working, is it not working, where can we improve? It�s not scientific but it�s good data. There�s points there that we can look at and say, �Okay, we�ve got to improve here or we�ve got to change this.�

JB: Okay, so it may be that we want to look at just what is the question�the question that we may want to ask may need to get refined then.

DD: That�s exactly right.

JB: Okay.

HS: Okay, some universities have videoconferencing facilities. Are people putting those videoconferencing facilities inside a smart classroom so that the students and faculty inside the classroom can videoconference with other people so something is being done?

DD: Oh, yes.

BT: Oh, yes, definitely.

HS: Does that mean that a university doesn�t need videoconferencing facilities if you do that? Just go to the smart classroom? I mean, are the smart classrooms going to replace the videoconferencing facilities that the university has?

DD: They�re another outlet for this. I mean, certainly some of us have some bandwidth in those interactive video facilities that we probably will have a hard time duplicating on Internet 2, but you can certainly add many more facilities and the occasional use, instead of having to march over to the library or those very specialized studios to do it.

BT: Yeah, I think the very specialized studios, I mean, satellite distance education is still alive and well, even though it�s being used a little bit less. You still have corporations who say the don�t want web classes. They want to have point to point video via satellite. But we are seeing a tremendous growth in the amount of, again, classroom videoconferencing and uses of products such as Centra or HorizonLive where you have a live class and then you�re doing a synchronous online class with students wherever, at a corporation, at home. We�re seeing growth at that level.

DD: Yes.

HS: You talked about the training that you give faculty to use the smart classrooms. What about students? Do you just assume the students can come in and can figure out what�s going on and what they can do or do you help students in some way deal with the technology?

DD: We have orientation and mini training sessions for students to deal with all levels of technology on campus and there�s 24/7 helpdesk for things that are outside of the classrooms. In our dorms, we have folks who come around and help counseling, help students with particular problems they may be having with the technology, either in the room or doing something with classes. So there�s quite an infrastructure of support that�s out there to help the students cope with it. And of course, they come and teach us things, too, so�

BT: Yeah, I was going to say, we have all that stuff and especially for like the freshman orientation, I think that�s becoming less important. And we do have students in the residence halls who become wired students, who work with students if they have problems. But yeah, I think�again, I had a meeting the other day with a student who--you know, we�re going live with a campus portal in January and one of our student centers came in and said they wanted to participate in, like, the test and the pilot because they want to do channelization of information, they want to do group discussions and all this. So they�re coming to me with the technical terms that we are just about to unveil saying that they are actively thinking about these.

JB: That�s super! Howard, do we have any other questions?

HS: We don�t have any other questions that people have sent in yet, but we have lots and lots of questions! One of the questions I have here is if we have some universities who are listening here who really haven�t gotten very much involved in this yet, how do they get started? Where do they go for help or what do they do first or how do they get off the ground? They�d like a smart classroom but really haven�t done one yet.

DD: Well, I can�t imagine that many folks in the university community haven�t a network through their professional organizations�

BT: Yeah.

DD: --and elsewhere and sort of had this, you know, like sand in the eyes every time they go somewhere.

HS: But I mean, some�lots of folks have stuck a projector in a classroom or something like that, but when it comes to instructional technology, working with this, what kind of support structure do they need? I mean, do they have to hire a bunch of A/V people? What should they be doing to make this thing work?

JB: Actually, I was going to say, maybe another way of coming at this is do you have any really good, major piece of advice that you would provide for folks that are building classrooms and going into this area?

DD: First and foremost, support your faculty champions. They�re the ones that will get you started and they will take the place of some of this technical support to get you sort of kick started. But they�ll pretty soon be leading the folks on who will demonstrate to you what kind of other support you need to make it work and to be able to deploy and sustain.

BT: Right. And again, I would reinforce the issue of having a faculty champion who, whether they�re a faculty in residence in technology or a faculty fellow in technology, that can really show the commitment of the institution, you know, having this person taking time off from teaching to say �this is important to the university.� So from a pedagogical standpoint or from a teaching standpoint, having the champion is important. But again, from how do you develop the classrooms, I mean, as we said, EDUCAUSE has a lot of materials. The Society for College and University Planners, SCUP, has a lot of materials. They have workshops and seminars about where do you put the projection systems, what are some spatial benchmarking things for seating and things like that. So there is information out there to help you design them.

DD: And obviously, if anyone�s in a design phase for either a new facility or renovation of an existing facility, this is sort of standard procedure that you�re going to bring someone in to provide some consulting in this area.

HS: You�ve been talking about�I think you�ve been talking about adding smart classrooms to existing classrooms. If someone were building a new building and the plan was to put smart classrooms in there, are there some things they should watch out for?

DD: Well, obviously the most important thing is to make sure that you have a system within the building that adds the flexibility of being able to change things later. I don�t think we have any way of envisioning just how large the wires and pipes and where we�re going to need them later on. So when we put those barriers in place that require tremendous structural change to come back and fix something later or to add it later, that�s the killer to the future deployment. But it would be foolish, I think, to get into any new facility design without bringing in a specialist firm to provide some insight into how we�re going to incorporate the audiovisual and the technology into the learning environment. And let�s also consider that that environment is well beyond the classroom. I mean, you see kids sitting in the commons areas, in the coffee shops, wherever they�re going to be on a wireless network, where they�ll be networking with each other. So it extends well beyond the classroom now.

BT: Yeah, and I would also reinforce, too, the flexibility issue. On building flexibility and on classroom flexibility and again, direct into libraries, having again more collaborative learning spaces. That�s one of the highest demand areas of our students. Our curriculum�s driving collaborative learning spaces and the places that have renovated, libraries or student centers, and they put some real thought into collaborative learning spaces are all saying that was one of the wisest things they did.

JB: Okay, well, listen, thank you. I want to thank our experts very much. Howard, do you have�it�s pretty close already�

HS: It�s pretty close here. And we were told we absolutely, positively have to be off on time here because the whole network is going down here!

JB: Hey, don�t scare people! It�s a false statement here!

HS: I think we�re safe for another couple minutes here.

JB: Right.

HS: Let me ask a futures question. What do you think this stuff is�where is this stuff going? What�s it going to look like in the future, a few years from now when we have smart classrooms, if we have classrooms at all? Bruce?

BT: Well, I would hope the vision would be to have, again, more inter-institutional type instructional delivery. It�s a very powerful, I think, environment when you have students and faculty from multiple institutions dealing with an issue and hopefully that expands to global. I mean, Internet 2 is still an under-utilized resource. If we can do more national and international teaching and have these smart classrooms be positioned to support faculty and students, I think that would be a tremendous direction to head in.

DD: And I think tweaking how we deliver�I mean, we�re seeing a change in the pedagogy. I think we�re going to need to spend much more time on developing the material that we teach and then develop strategies that make for much more active learning and much more involved learning and more continuous kind of learning. And I suspect ultimately that the challenge is going to get down to probably less concern with seat time and more concerned with outcomes.

JB: So maybe our next conversation will not be about smart classrooms but about smart materials.

HS: Or smart learning spaces. BT and

JB: Or smart learning spaces, yeah.

BT: That�s right, without a doubt.

JB: Okay, great.

BT: Wherever they may be!

JB: Howard, any final comment?

HS: No, I think that�s a good note to end it on, that we�re going to go from smart classrooms�and we started here talking about the regular old classrooms, went to smart classrooms and now we�re moving into the future into smart learning spaces.

JB: All right! Well, with that, then, I�d like to thank everyone for being with us here today and for all of their many questions. We didn�t get all of them answered but we�ll ask our experts to answer those offline.

BT: Okay!

JB: Be sure to join us again in two weeks, on October 24th, to talk about Web Conferencing Tools and Are They Ready for Us? Our two experts will be Judy Brown from the University of Wisconsin and Mary Trauner from Georgia Tech. Thanks to all of our CREN member institutions for their support of these Tech Talks. Be sure and join CREN if you�re not, and also many thanks to the Sextant Group, Technology Consultants to Higher Education, for their support in making this Tech Talk possible. Many thanks to our Tech Talk experts, Darryl Davis and Bruce Taggart; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis, our audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time. Bye, Darryl, bye, Bruce, Howard.

HS: Bye-bye.

DD: Bye-bye.

JB: See everyone out there on October 24th.

HS: You betcha! Bye-bye.

JB: All right, bye, now.

END OF WEBCAST

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