The experts in Active Learning, Bonwell & Eison, stated in 1991 already “that in active learning, students participate in the process when they are doing something besides passively listening“. Active learning is “a method of learning in which students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process and where there are different levels of active learning, depending on student involvement“
Often universities and other educational institutes are looking for hardware solutions if it comes to support the active learning proces in a class room. At Eumedianet we have another approach:
“It’s about the content, not the hardware, so share content not screens“
So instead of investering 100-thousands of Euro’s, search for solutions that are not only much cheaper, but also give you the opportunity, beside of the local class room, to introduce active learning in the virtual space.
Beats is a cloud based solution for educational institutes that is build to add a virtual component to the physical class room by using browser based applications and a unique casting service.
In the image above, you see the set up of a active learning space with a teacher and several tables with students. Each table will have a (portrait) screen to share toughts and content. The teacher will have a screen also and will operate a central screen for the plenary exchange of ideas. Each screen will have a small Intel-NUC pc connected with a Chrome web browser for sharing ideas. The student can ‘cast” each laptop screen to the table screen to encourage collaboration. The teacher can give the students access to “cast” to the central screen for plenary discussion, and also can watch all the laptop screens of the students in the class room, or in the virtual space.
The student tables will be booked simular as a restaurant-table-booking. Via surveys it is possible to base the table layout on student profiles, to get lively discussion from different points of view and different opinions.
The teacher can prepare the AVL session by uploading files to the system prior to the session. At home, in the office, from everwhere location-independent using an internet connection.
Beats can handle a very wide list of files, like Powerpoint presentations, PDF, Word and Excel documents, images and video’s that can be used in the case.
Once uploaded the case can be split into subcases, so every student group (table) can start working on a subcase in a web browser environment, using the preparated document. Once done, the different subcases will be discussed plenary.
Cases can be stored, so when the same group wants to continue the work, they continue where they’ve stopped. Because it is a cloud based, collaboration environment, the work doesn’t have to be done in the physical class room. Using video connections together with the Beats collaboration portal will create a virtual class room where people share ideas, work on the same stories and case, show each other interesting video’s about the case they are working on, and finish their work. The teacher can have a supervisor role and has access to all the subcase-workspaces of the students in the cloud….or in the class room of course.
Let the sales team of Eumedianet tell you more about this unique concept and find out if this is something for your students…..