AVT Question: Please share insight and best practices for designing the higher ed classroom for today and the future.
Thought Leader: Madhav Jain, Insights Manager, Education at Sennheiser
Hybrid classrooms are here to stay. For AV and IT managers, this means much more than simply getting students online; they must ensure that the classroom fosters engagement and collaboration, and that it simultaneously enables flexibility for all students across the physical hardware setup and the software platforms that support it. It is highly recommended that AV and IT managers familiarize themselves with the Pedagogy-Space-Technology (PST) framework developed at The University of Queensland. This methodology is a useful guide for the creation of new and modern teaching spaces.
Flexibility will allow the dynamic in-person classroom environment to seamlessly extend to remote participants so that meaningful learning can be achieved for all." —Madhav Jain, Insights Manager, Education at Sennheiser
PST encourages looking at the pedagogy of the classroom (active learning, lecture hall, et cetera), and pragmatically seeking technology and a physical layout that will enhance and inspire the learning activities. The result would be a classroom where the teaching methodology is enabled by the physical space and empowered by technology.
A key part of the PST strategy is flexibility, and for AV and IT, that translates to having interoperability across all the layers of the tech stack so that educators and students have full functionality for content sharing, audio and video streaming, student participation, proctoring, and more. For instance, this can be achieved by deploying ceiling microphones that have integrated features like camera tracking and are certified for various collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. This flexibility will allow the dynamic in-person classroom environment to seamlessly extend to remote participants so that meaningful learning can be achieved for all.
