The editorial board of the University of Maryland student newspaper knows irony when it sees it. A much-touted new building with a tech-heavy 500-student classroom will be called the Teaching and Learning Center.
How good can even the best available technologies be when used in such a massive room among 500 students? While electronic clickers seemed like a pretty viable solution at one point, most students disapprove of these devices and find them an outdated waste of money.
Officials understand the importance of small classes — especially ones that are specifically tailored to the learning objectives of students in them — and have proved their dedication to bringing these types of innovative courses to the university. This editorial board is then left puzzled by plans to construct large auditoriums …
Well, but small’s a matter of degree… The University of Arizona has a 1,200-person lecture hall. So maybe administrators at the University of Maryland think a 500-person lecture hall is small. It’s certainly smaller.
And what was that about clickers? I’m sorry, but UM students are jumping the gun on that one. We still have one or two academic years to go before that backlash. We’re well-launched on the PowerPoint backlash, and of course the backlash against laptops in class is in full swing… But type CLICKERS UNIVERSITY into Google News and eighty percent of what you get will still be faculty, tech staff, and administration peeing their pants with excitement over them.
Students? Yeah, students have been bitching about clickers from the word go. But we’re still in the students? huh? lalala i can’t hear you phase on clickers.
October 14th, 2011 at 2:52PM
mostly the reason I hated clickers was that it let the prof confirm my non-presence in the classroom. 11 am biology conflicted with the price is right, you can’t expect me to miss bob barker.
October 14th, 2011 at 3:14PM
bfa: Give your clicker to a friend in the course. Everybody’s doing it. Time you knew about it.
October 15th, 2011 at 6:46PM
See, this is a place where I think you focus on the technology and miss the real story. The tech is a symptom: the disease is classrooms with 500, 750, 1000 students, taught by a lecture that might as well be on a television or a video screen or converted into PowerPoint. Take away every bit of tech but papers, pencils and a roof over the heads of that many students and it won’t get any better unless there is someone who is an extraordinarily gifted performer with specific facility in *that kind of venue* day-in and day-out.
October 15th, 2011 at 7:45PM
Tim: I think the story is a synergy between tech and mammoth halls. Universities couldn’t try to bullshit students (University of Maryland students don’t seem to be buying it) about how wonderful the halls are without being able to get all excited about how the students are going to be the beneficiaries of the very latest classroom technology. Lucky students!