What your classroom looks like should not determine how you teach. How you teach should determine what your classroom looks like. Unfortunately however, this isn’t always a reality yet. Teachers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands experienced a mismatch between traditional lecture halls and their aim to provide personal, activating, interactive, flexible, multidisciplinary and small-scale education. One teacher in particular was determined to change this disparity. During the process one thing became very clear: physical learning environment has a major influence on teaching and learning.
Jasper van Winden remembers how he stood in front of a lecture hall, back in 2016. Extremely well prepared for the biology lecture he was about to give. He had redesigned his programme and had ‘flipped the classroom’ so he could have his students actively get to work in small groups.
“But when I stood there”, says Van Winden, “I realized that what I had in mind simply wasn’t possible. Tables and chairs were fixed together and with rows of eight seats with only a path on the left, it was physically impossible for me to reach my students. I felt that the room gave me no other option than to stand in front of the white board and talk. However: my students had already seen my lecture, as I had recorded it in advance. So basically, the whole thing was a disaster.”
Astonishing results
At the time Van Winden was involved in establishing the so-called Teaching & Learning Lab (TLL) at Utrecht University, which he describes as a nursery for experiments with and research into new educational content and methods. The lab initially wasn’t meant to look into physical spaces, but Van Winden was fed up with the limitations he experienced in traditional lecture halls and initiated to convert the TLL into an Active Learning Classroom (ALC) to experiment in. Although the setup was rather provisional at first, the results were astonishing.
When Van Winden recalls this first experiment, his eyes light up. “Students were absolutely thrilled. They felt activated because they could see what others were doing. They experienced interaction with each other and more closeness to me and other teachers. It was amazing to see how this translated into them being able to concentrate so much longer. After a lengthy morning session like this, students would normally be totally exhausted and leave as soon as the clock strikes one. But do you know what? This time half of the group stayed until 3 p.m.!
To me it was such a breath of fresh air. I had all my students within arm’s reach, so I could maintain an overview of what they were working on. Being able to follow their learning process resulted in me giving more focused and effective feedback. This was such a huge improvement, such a step forward, that I felt I could not possibly withhold this from the rest of the university.”
| In an active learning classroom the lecturer stands in the center of the room. Groups of about six students - who can choose to sit or stand thanks to sit-to-stand tables - have their own whiteboard or digital wall and a screen. The lecturer can show a presentation on every screen and students can share their own screen and also display it at other tables. |
Future Learning Spaces
Van Winden shared his findings with anyone who would listen. “Most people I spoke to agreed that, although the Utrecht Teaching Model allocates a central role to activating teaching, a substantial part of the curriculum was still largely based on instruction from a lecturer, due to traditional learning spaces. Up until then most teachers thought that physical space was just a given that they had to accept and work with. But with more and more of them I talked about what their classroom would look like if they could redesign it. It marked the start of the Future Learning Spaces project.”
After a two year pilot in the TLL, enough data was collected to build a permanent Active Learning Classroom at the university. It raised the question what else could be possible and cleared the way for new experiments. Students and teachers joined forces with colleagues from Student Affairs, Education & Research, Real Estate & Campus, the Facilities Service Centre and Information and Technology Services. All of them committed to developing a widespread physical learning environment that matches and reinforces Utrecht University’s vision of education.
Van Winden: “We have a co-creation community Learning Spaces that consists of about 65 students, teachers and other staff members. Every month we discuss a (new) concept and look into how we can improve. I think the way we in Utrecht are stimulated to experiment and manage to approach this in such an integral, multidisciplinary way is quite unique and very rewarding.”
Respectful atmosphere
One of the co-creation community members is physics master’s student, Franka Jesse. “I became involved because we had a big space in our building that used to be a canteen, but now wasn’t being utilized sufficiently. As I felt this was a waste, I conducted a session in which we explored and discussed how we could turn this space into a Learning Plaza with various functions. For instance with corners for small groups to meet, seats for working alone, an area to drink coffee and relax and a section for (hybrid) lectures.
It was very inspiring to actually sit down, look into the possibilities and draw a map. Because the meetings are open to anyone, so not just community members, we see a lot of different perspectives. You don’t always realize what challenges people in different roles are dealing with, so teachers and other staff are very interested in what students think and the other way around. For instance teachers said they would never have come up with our suggestion that chairs should be able to rotate so we can easily turn to other groups, screens and the teacher. There is such a pleasant and respectful atmosphere, that it makes everyone feel heard and no one holds back in sharing what they think.”
Hybrid
In the summer of 2021 the Active Learning Classroom in Utrecht was converted into the first Dutch Hybrid Active Learning Classroom: a room that makes it possible to work with mixed groups of people - no matter where they are located - and simultaneously give central instruction. “You might think the pandemic was responsible for this conversion”, says Jasper Van Winden, “but it was already in the pipeline long before COVID-19. This is because Utrecht is part of several international alliances, for example CHARM-EU. In this program, together with four other European universities, we offer transdisciplinary, challenge-based education in various forms: mobile, flexible, online and suitable for various target demographics.
So we had a head start in gaining experience in remote education. When the pandemic increased the demand, our expertise from Future Learning Spaces was called in to help equip more classrooms with hybrid functions. We have been able to convert about forty rooms so far.”
Creative solutions
A fond user of the Hybrid Active Learning Classroom is lecturer Tom Frijns. “In my teaching I very much like to alternate between different work formats. But most rooms are only suitable to either have a group sitting down and listening to you for two hours with hardly any interaction, or to have a much smaller group that you can put to work. This has always been a struggle and a puzzle for me. But then I heard about the hybrid active learning space and was – after an interview – permitted to do my international Communication and Leadership Master’s course there.
Although the room was still in development it already offered so much more opportunities than the traditional rooms I had had to work in up until then. I could now have a group of forty to fifty students actively get to work together. Some students were joining from abroad and others were in isolation due to covid, so every week a number of people were at different locations. Before, hybrid meant: ‘oh well, we’ll turn on a camera and good luck to everyone’. But in this new learning space everybody can actually join in actively, because, among other things, a camera follows me around the room. Furthermore I could choose to have the online students form a group together, or to divide them over the workstations in the room and they would pop up on the various screens and join group discussions.
The room gives you so much more opportunity to vary. It brings out a lot of creativity in students when you give them space to be in charge of their own learning process. In this room I’ve seen them come up with creative solutions I hadn’t seen before. I think it illustrates how a physical space can very much support a teachers’ goals. I tell colleagues about my experiences all the time, hoping there will soon be more of these (hybrid) active learning classrooms available.”
Current Learning Spaces (under development): Virtual Classroom: An educational experience where students and instructors work remotely, but education is comparable to that in a physical learning environment. The collaborative classroom: Room with alternating rows of lower and higher tables where students on the lower tables can turn around so they can form groups with students behind them. (Hybrid) Active Learning Classroom: Space where interactive, student-oriented learning takes place, and which stimulates active learning through its layout. Learning Plaza: Offers a mix of functions for formal and informal learning, for students and staff. Teaching & Learning Lab: Educational and testing facility to experiment in. |
More to explore
And scaling up is indeed what Van Winden intends to do. “Experiments that have proved to work, will become the standard and are no longer called a future learning space. But that doesn’t mean our job is done. For instance: why are there separate conference rooms for staff? Couldn’t students and staff share more facilities to increase interaction and strengthen the community? And what about Community Engaged Learning for that matter? Perhaps we could stimulate dialog with society by opening up our campuses more and have them serve as meeting places for students, staff and societal stakeholders, each learning from each other. There is still so much more to explore, so we will definitely keep experimenting.”
Previous Chronicle articles by Utrecht University:
- ‘The world does not benefit from one trick pony’s’
- ‘My research focus changed after talking to children’
- Innovate your education? Change the culture!
- ‘We owe it to society to make science more accessible’
Do you have questions in response to this article? Please contact the author, Hanneke Olivier.
Founded: 1636 (learn more about the history of Utrecht University) Number of students: 35.000 Bachelor’s programmes: 54 Master’s programmes: 160 Number of dissertations per year: 600World University Ranking, Times Higher Education 2022: 69 (see Utrecht in other rankings) Nobel Prize winners: 12 More facts & figures
