Prototyping Projects

Pilot to Practice
In order to prepare our faculty and students to take advantage of the extraordinary facilities The Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge will offer, we needed to build a culture of teaching innovation. We embarked on a series of prototyping projects to define how technologies and pedagogy come together to support new ways of teaching and learning.

Our goals were to identify forward-thinking faculty and match them with the appropriate technologies to support their educational innovations. These special projects allowed us to develop support models to change technology-enabled innovative teaching from the pilot phase to established practice and build a collection of models to share with a broader educational community.

Prototype 1: Flexible Learning Labs

The Fleischmann wet labs were redesigned in 2003 to create a technology-enhanced flexible teaching environment to support the curricular change towards small group teaching while still providing for use of traditional lab tools. We created four wet labs with flexible seating that can be further divided into eight small group rooms. Each classroom contains a large digital projector for presentations; a plasma screen connected to a multi-headed microscope, two desktop computers for presentations, and fast wireless connection for laptops.

The redesigned labs encourage students and facilitators to engage in discussions of course content and concepts. “Introduction to Radiological Anatomy” faculty used the labs to completely redesign their course from lecture-based to a format in which teams of students analyze patient cases from the hospital imaging system and present findings to the rest of the class.

Prototype 2: M104 / M106 Enabling Dynamic Lectures / Innovation

In January 2004, we installed new presentation technologies in our two largest lecture halls to meet our faculty members’ growing collection of digital media and to make it easier to create dynamic learning interactions. The new classrooms support digital ink for image annotation, document cameras for live display of 3D objects, audience polling, and an intuitive way to manage the display of multiple media sources.

We created a faculty development program and comprehensive support to encourage widespread adoption of these interactive teaching technologies. Results were astounding: in the first quarter alone, over 40% used digital ink and 10% used the document camera. We continue to use this successful training model to encourage all faculty to integrate new technologies into their daily teaching.

Prototype 3: Team Learning Classroom

Building on experience from earlier classroom prototypes, in 2005 we opened the new M112 Team Learning Classroom to support the new curriculum and its emphasis on new team-based sessions and interactive lectures. M112 pulled together the technology-enabled small group experience from the Fleischmann Labs with the presentation capabilities from the M-104/106 lecture halls to create a flexible 70-person classroom.

Faculty and students love M112, as evidenced by the heavy scheduling. Usage and support data from M112 increases our understanding of the requirements for similar advanced capability classrooms in the upcoming Learning and Knowledge Center.