With walls that can be written on, plasma screen TVs and group desks linked with their own interactive computers, Cal State Long Beach’s first active learning classroom has features that could suit an episode of “Star Trek.”
“There are so many different types of devices that will help enhance the learning experience for students,” CSULB Director of Instructional Technology Leslie Kennedy said. “When students come in this door, they walk in and they immediately sense a difference. [Everything] is conducive to learning. Then you say, ‘Hey, you can write on the walls.'”
Located in room 244 of the Academic Services building, the approximately $244,000 classroom became fully operational in August and is part of a larger effort on campus to create more student-oriented learning spaces, Kennedy said. Funding for the rooms comes from the Academic Affairs budget, Kennedy said.
“The idea is that students coming in now are learning better in this type of environment as opposed to a lecture,” Kennedy said. “It’s the ‘learn by doing’ concept, team-based, working on activities in class. That’s what this was created for.”
Passive learning is characterized by a lecture format and a rigid course structure that can go unchanged for years, according to the 2009 Human Resource Quarterly “Active Versus Passive Teaching Styles: An Empirical Study of Student Learning Outcomes” published by Wiley Interscience.
While most of the research is far from conclusive, studies show that active learning is at least as effective as passive learning, if not more so, according to Wiley Interscience.
“What we are trying to do is show … that you can use these tools to enhance the learning experience and maybe to engage students a little bit more,” Kennedy said.
Senior economics major Christian Blabagno has yet to experience the active learning classroom first-hand but said that it sounds like a much-needed improvement.
“I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t work,” Blabagno said. “I can only imagine getting to apply the concepts right there in class rather than trying to learn it all out of a book. I know I’d pay more attention and probably even enjoy it. Economics lectures are brutal.”
Due to the success of and demand for the active learning classroom, Kennedy said more active learning classrooms will be built.
“This is just the beginning; it’s sparked a conversation,” Kennedy said. “When we show it to teachers, they say, ‘We want to teach in here.’ People keep asking, and that’s why we are going to do three more.”
Two of the new classrooms will be located in rooms 217 and 218 of the College of Business and Administration and the other will be in AS 235. The new active learning rooms are going live by fall and will be university-scheduled classrooms that any teacher can reserve, although priority will be given to low completion courses, Kennedy said.
“There are still classrooms that don’t have anything in them, but by the end of next year, because I manage the technology in those rooms, we are hopefully going to have almost all of them taken care of,” Kennedy said.
