24 / ’southern
Trading chalk for circuits—
BSC
’s bold new classroom
Welcome to the classroom of the future: Olin 205.
Forget whiteboards—much less chalkboards—or overhead
projectors. The new classroom, built this summer as a pilot
project to find new ways to deliver classroom content, boasts
four 70-inch high-definition monitors, one with a built-in
computer and touchscreen with broadcast capability; two HD
cameras, and the server storage and bandwidth to transmit and
receive to up to three remote locations at the same time.
“This is really going to be something else,” said BSC’s
president, Gen. Charles C. Krulak. “It opens all kinds of
doors for new teaching methods and new opportunities for
our students and also for potentially bringing in new revenue
opportunities. And it really puts Birmingham-Southern out
front.”
The new Olin 205, built entirely this summer, grew out of
conversations between the Provost and Information Technology,
as well as research into what other colleges have—or wish they
had.
The $80,000 classroom, which seats 70 and is housed in the
building used by the math department, puts BSC in the position
to produce or receive content as part of the Associated Colleges
of the South’s blended learning initiative, which is encouraging
ACS schools to share courses across the 16 campuses. Down the
road, Birmingham-Southern students could take advantage of a
senior Chinese course at Rollins, or a student at Sewanee could
take a class in Urban Environmental Studies at BSC.
To start with, there are two screens at the front of the room
and two in the back, plus cameras pointed in both directions.
That means a faculty member can teach a group of BSC
students on-site and have both the professor’s and the students’
interactions instantly transmitted to, say, students at a peer
institution eager to cross-enroll in a BSC course.
One of the front screens is actually an Infocus Mondopad,
which operates like a giant iPad with a touchscreen. It’s one of
the first Mondopads in use on a college campus, and it allows
a professor to share whatever’s on the screen to wireless devices
like tablets or laptops, so students can instantly see notes and
information—whether they’re in the room or across an ocean.
They can even write on their own tablet and have the data pop
up on the Mondopad, which also allows for all notes to be saved
and emailed to the entire class for easy reference.
The other screen allows users to dial in from anywhere in the
world and appear in the classroom in high definition—making
even the hardest-to-book guest lecturers easy to invite. It can
connect up to three different locations at once, and it can also
dial in to a series of live cameras around the world. To test
it out during a recent education class discussion on teaching
patriotism to elementary schoolers, Dr. Genell D. Lewis-Ferrell
asked her students to stand and say the pledge of allegiance.
“Only let’s not say it right here in Birmingham, let’s say the
pledge somewhere else,” she said, pausing for just a moment to
dial into a camera showing an ordinary-looking street scene in
Washington, D.C. Then she panned the camera up in real time
to focus on the flag flying atop the U.S. Capitol—eliciting gasps
of amazement and excitement from the class.
The options for using the new classroom are almost endless,
organizers say. As well as getting BSC ready for blended
learning and the ACS initiative, Olin 205 can also be used by
faculty who want to flip their classrooms (see page 20) or for
videoconferencing for guest lecturers, meetings, and interviews.
Faculty and administrators are also looking into the possibility
of using it to offer summer school courses to students who may
want to take classes without living on campus.
And it’s just the beginning. Krulak said there are already plans
to build four more high-tech classrooms across the campus.
“This is going to enable us to do remarkable things,” he said.
“We’re going to learn a lot from other schools about how best to
take advantage of it, but we know already that we can enhance
what professors do in the classroom and attract more students to
campus. Olin 205 is just the beginning.”
The Mondopad easily converts to a whiteboard for note-taking during class discussions.
