Campus use is changing, but shared space is essential when creating a feeling of institutional belonging and connection
Technological tools and how they are deployed will help universities differentiate themselves in the future, said Ted Brodheim, Zoom’s global chief information adviser, at a THE World Academic Summit discussion, hosted by THE in partnership with Zoom.
When the pandemic first struck, universities scrambled to shift their teaching online, but now they are looking to technology to replicate the social interactions that occurred naturally in physical spaces, while navigating the demand for hybrid learning.
There has been a proliferation in technology attempting to recreate personal interactions between students and faculty, Brodheim said. These range from breakout rooms to interactive whiteboards. “There are lots of tools coming out,” he said.
“When you start making interactions more personal and focused on how the student is looking to receive things, I think that the very nature of the culture and location of the campus is going to begin to come through,” Brodheim said. “You will notice things being very different from one university to another in terms of how they approach their remote learning students and how they integrate students doing part of their education online and part in person.”
For the University of Wollongong in Australia, “campus has been one of our main drawcards”, said Sue Bennett, head of school of education at the institution. “We’ve thought through how we connect and how we create some of that engagement, the engagement that happens for students outside of class time.” Campuses “are a place to belong and connect”, she said, “and we need to be able to take that online environment and integrate our physical and technology-supported spaces.”
Technology enables students and staff to toggle between the different environments and bridge the divide. For Shuaiguo Wang, president of XuetangX, an online learning platform spearheaded by Tsinghua University in China, technology supports learning, whether in the physical classroom or a digital learning environment. In 2020, more than 21 million university students and educators used XuetangX’s smart teaching app, Rain Classroom. While the app enables remote learning, teachers also use it in the physical classroom. Irrespective of the location, whether face-to-face or remote, the learning remains the same.
Going forward, collaboration should play an increasingly important role in curriculum development and learning. “Recently, professors from many universities in China formed a virtual room for teaching and research. Although they come from different universities, they have designed the pedagogy together,” Wang said. “To achieve stronger cooperation between universities must be at the top of our agenda.”
Watch the session on demand above or on the THE Connect YouTube channel.
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