Engaged Active Student Learning spaces first came to Auburn’s campus three years ago, using strategic furniture placement and technology to create a new learning environment that forces professors to teach differently and students to learn through collaboration.
Wiebke Kuhn, College of Liberal Arts IT manager, said the classroom building committee first created these classrooms for the College of Liberal Arts to see how a different way of learning would affect students’ grades.
“In the course of discussing what kind of learning spaces would go into that space, we decided it would be a good idea to have kind of a pilot classroom space here on campus to see how an active learning classroom actually works.”
With the success of the first EASL classroom, the College of Sciences and Mathematics wanted one as well.
Now the new Mell Street building will house these interactive classrooms, according to Kuhn.
“They’ve been around at other universities for a long time,” Kuhn said. “The research about these places suggests that students learn more effectively in them, partly because the space does not treat the students like high school students.”
Kuhn said students in EASL spaces have seen improvements in their grades.
“We’ve also started seeing that the grades of students who were in these kinds of spaces were actually improving in comparison to students in the same course in a traditional style lecture classroom,” Kuhn said.
The EASL spaces have large tables instead of individual desks so students may easily communicate and share information using technology to share tablet and laptop screens through programs such as ClickShare and Apple TV.
“The two major components in this classroom are the collaborative furniture…and the glass boards all around the room,” Kuhn said. “The technology is like the icing on the cake.”
The use of televisions, glass boards and screen sharing allow for interactive learning as well as an interesting way to present group work to a class, according to Kuhn.
Although students have picked up on how to use the technology rather easily, maintaining the ever-changing technology becomes a challenge sometimes, Kuhn said.
“The more complex the technology gets, the trickier it is to maintain," Kuhn said. "So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t."
The effects of learning in an EASL space goes beyond the classroom, according to Kuhn.
“It allows students to collaborate and communicate more easily with each other, and those are leadership skills that future employers are very interested in,” Kuhn said.
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