Building the Classroom of Tomorrow: Using Technology for Active Learning

Indiana University is embracing innovative technologies and techniques to help move their classrooms into the future. Take a field trip to the Indiana University campus and see how a new approach to lecture capture is making it easier than ever to support learning on demand. See how their Mosaic program is using video cameras not only to record lectures for students, but to help researchers improve the physical layouts of classrooms and choose better technologies to encourage learning.

Panelists:
Stacy Morrone - Associate Vice President, Indiana University
Julie Johnston - Director, Learning Spaces, Indiana University
James McGookey - Manager, Collaboration Technologies, Indiana University
Nate Pairitz - Lead Collaboration Engineer

Transcript

We're really busy in transforming our student study spaces. And we are conducting lots of transformations of technology rich study spaces that are collaborative. And interesting and inspiring. Our classrooms are a wide variety of spaces. All the way from what we call an active and able classroom that allow students to wirelessly project to a projector. We use video-rich experiences, high collaboration technologies. When you walk through our campus, you can tell that our spaces were purposeful. However, we started because we wanted it to be bigger than just building classrooms.

So the Mosaic Initiative started because we were having some very good success creating these really beautiful new learning spaces. But the part that we hadn't yet done, is to really create a program for faculty, to really help them know how to teach in these rooms. To really support the faculty, in thinking differently about their teaching. To move from a more passive kind of model of instruction to a much more active model of instruction.

And what's more important about this initiative is not just the transformation of their teaching but they are conducting their own personal research on active learning and we support that individual research.

I think that our students today are really wanting to be more engaged, to do more in the classrooms, to have the experience be meaningful. The Mosaic classrooms really have something for everyone.

It's more than just building a space, but it's about what's happening in the classrooms. And really being on the forefront of what teaching and learning should look like.

Classrooms at Indiana University have a lot of technology in them. One thing we try to do is try to keep technology as similar as we can in all classes.

A Professor may walk into a new classroom and see technology everywhere, we have displays on walls, we have video walls, we have all kinds of tools that are available to him. But we've really taken the philosophy that things need to be, simple, they need to be easy to use, they need to be integrated. The Open Capture Standard is vital to creating this seamless experience that we require for our students here.

Video is so foundational for today's learner, In our view.

Lecture capture is part of what we do. It's not a question on should we enhance our classrooms with Lecture Capture? It's a question of how are we going to.

One nice thing about the culture of Lecture Capture is the automatic work flow. Instructors are busy. They don't have time to set up anything. So with Kaltura Lecture Capture we have that all automatically scheduled. The teacher walks in, sets up her class, engages the students, and starts teaching. Students actually have access to those videos when they walk out of class. Once that gets into our system, it's automatically close captioned and provides a transcript to the end user.

By using the open capture standard, we can integrate other systems into Kaltura and have those videos appear just like lectures do. So for instance we used the open capture standard for our video conferencing and recordings.

Part of being seamless here at IU is trying to get content media in all in one spot. One piece that was missing for us is a lecture capture piece. It always was a stand alone system for us. With Kaltura bringing lecture capture to us we're able to ingest that into the Kaltura media management system and utilize all in one spot.

So this is a single video management solution. It does not matter where the content comes from. It's all in the same repository. It's all available using the same tools, using the same features and functionality.

So we can tell the instructor, the students you have media go to Kaltura.

I found the opportunity to take Kaltura lecture capture in front of the instructors and the common feedback, the number one feedback, Is the ease of use.

You know, this is the most important thing. We want it to be easy to use. We want it to be integrated with our larger video management solution and just appear as seamless as possible. Kaltura lecture capture meets that standard.

This is exactly what we need for the instructors.

They don't have to think about how to get it started or how to make it work in their class. How to have it integrated with our learning management system. It's all done. It all works and it allows that teacher to teach.

One of the ways that we've used Kaltura is to capture our own research data. So we are conducting research in our spaces of how students study.

Kaltura lecture capture capability really does allow faculty to capture what's happening without them really having to worry about it at the time that they're teaching. But then to go back and to try to do some analysis on what was really going on in the classroom?

One thing that's vital when deploying a new software is being at the ground floor with the vendor.

We've worked closely with the Kaltura beta team over the last few months for the Kaltura lecture capture product.

They've listened, they've been responsive, and they've even taken our consideration and implemented those.

We feel like we've had quite a bit of say in how this product has been shaped, and we think that it's going to work for us.