A lot of classroom AV gets designed around one instructor presenting to students facing forward. That is the right design for a lecture hall, and it describes a shrinking share of what happens in a classroom. Seminars, studios, case-method courses, and active-learning sections all put students in conversation with each other. And a room built for presentation makes that harder than it needs to be, especially once some students are joining online.
Here is what discussion-focused rooms tend to get right, from years of specifying and installing them.
Sightlines and layout
The room should let students see each other, not just the front. That usually means clustered or perimeter seating rather than rows, with enough circulation space for an instructor to move between groups. Displays go on more than one wall, so a group has a screen to use regardless of orientation, and so student work can be shown from where students are sitting rather than only from the podium.
Flexible furniture helps wherever the teaching uses it. Tables that reconfigure for group work are a real asset in a case-method or project course. In a room that mostly runs as a single seminar circle, fixed seating built around that circle works fine. And it is cheaper to maintain.
Audio carries the discussion
In a presentation room, one microphone on the instructor is enough. In a discussion room, the online students and the recording both need to hear the students, and the students are scattered across the whole space. That means ceiling arrays or well-placed beamforming microphones covering the entire seating area, so a comment from any seat gets picked up. It means acoustic treatment, soft surfaces, ceiling tiles, wall panels, so a lively room does not turn into reverberating noise on the recording. And it means audio that feeds the conferencing and capture systems without anyone switching sources, so the remote experience is the actual discussion, not just the instructor’s half of it.
Good room audio also improves automatic caption accuracy downstream, which lightens the captioning workload.
Cameras built for a room where people move
An auto-tracking camera that follows the instructor between groups gives online students a view of an active room instead of an empty lectern. A second, wider camera on the seating area lets remote students see who is speaking. Neither should require the instructor to operate anything. The value of the room evaporates the moment teaching it also means directing it.
Writable and shareable surfaces
Discussion produces work-in-progress: diagrams, lists, an argument being built in real time. Rooms that support this well have generous writable surface, wall whiteboards or writable wall paint, plus a way to capture what gets written: a document camera, a wall-mounted camera aimed at the board, or digital whiteboarding on a touch display. A student who was not in the room, or who is reviewing later, should be able to see the actual thinking, not just the conclusion.
Control that stays out of the way
A discussion room’s control system needs to do a few things plainly: bring up the right displays, start the conferencing session, and then get out of the way. If running the room competes for the instructor’s attention while a conversation is unfolding, the room is working against its own purpose.
Building it into a template
Institutions that do this well define a discussion-room or active-learning template alongside their lecture template. A documented standard for seating approach, display placement, microphone coverage, camera setup, and writable surfaces, sized to a handful of room capacities. That template drives the specification every time one of these rooms gets built or renovated, so each one is right for how it will be taught, rather than a lecture room with the chairs rearranged.
Margot Hemsfeld is a classroom audiovisual specialist at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the The Connected Classroom series.
References
- EDUCAUSE. Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition (annual). https://www.educause.edu/horizon-report
- U.S. Access Board. Section 508 standards, including assistive listening. https://www.access-board.gov/ict/