Regents tour OSU's innovative ITLE facilities

Friday, September 15, 2006

Stillwater, OK – Members of OSU’s A&M Board of Regent’s toured OSU’s Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence Friday. Regents had a chance to get a closer look at the classrooms of the future for higher education.

Laptops, Internet communications and visual media are replacing the rows of desks for students and a lectern for the instructor, changing the definition of a classroom. Uniting the high tech tools of today’s classrooms and the potential for peer teaching and learning, OSU’s ITLE is allowing students and faculty to experience the potential future of higher education.

Classrooms within the ITLE feature round tables and Bluetooth wireless technology, allowing students to engage in group activity without time restrictions. Simultaneously, instructors using the classrooms are trying out new ways of teaching.

“It’s all based on the idea that instead of pouring the information into a student’s head, we, as facilitators, guide them to it,” says Alan Cheville, associate professor of electrical engineering. “This allows students to seek their own knowledge, and research indicates this makes retention more effective.”

Plans for the classrooms began in the late ‘90s with a grant from the National Science Foundation. The ITLE has been working since to provide technologically facilitated instruction and professional development opportunities for faculty, such as workshops for technology implementation. The institute also serves as a place for collaborative learning research.

As part of the institute’s advancement, a VBrick system was installed this summer at OSU branch sites to allow multimedia to be stored on Web-based databases, permitting faculty and students Internet access to course-related multimedia.

“This was an important step in moving OSU into the next phase of becoming a high tech learning environment,” said OSU Provost and Senior Vice President Marlene Strathe. “Web-based databases are much faster and more efficient than traditional uploading systems.”

The ITLE is housed in the OSU Telecommunications building. Additional modern classrooms on campus are planned with the renovation of Murray Hall and construction of the new classroom building at Hall of Fame and Monroe.