Monday, October 24, 2016

UTS Engineering and IT Building

UTS Engineering and IT Building, University of Technology in Sydney
Today I have been attending the 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2016) at the UTS Engineering and IT Building, University of Technology Sydney. The building is only two years old and is a good example of a modern, large scale higher education building.

Each teaching room has a display screen outside showing what sessions are booked. This is useful, but one problem is that the small teaching rooms have heavily frosted glass panels onto the corridor, so it is not possible to see if there is anyone actually in the room (the large lecture theaters have clear panels).

The large lecture theaters provide mains power points for each student. These are hidden under the desk and a bit hard to find, but work well. The student desks are fixed with chairs on wheels and a generous amount of space. On problem is that the ceiling lighting extends down the walls on each side, creating glare.

The small teaching rooms have flip up tables on wheels, for flexibility. All the rooms have the same standard teaching station, with computer and document camera.

My laptop switched to HDMI output and I needed an external monitor to switch back. Wandering around the building looking for a screen I found a student study room with two technical support staff. They found me a spare screen and I was able to get my laptop going.

There is also an excellent cafe in the building, which is used for informal teaching as well as socializing.

However, this building is not perfect. There are no large flexible teaching spaces in the building (at least none I could find). That is rooms with flat floors, for one hundred, or more, students. The building has many teaching spaces, but these are either small, or have stepped floors (and so are fixed in use).

No comments:

Post a Comment