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A New High-Tech Learning Center Changed How These Professors Teach

The Chronicle of Higher Education  |  Julia Schmalz When the Edward St. John Learning & Teaching Center opened this fall at the University of Maryland at College Park, students were not the only ones learning. Faculty members using the high-tech spaces designed for collaborative learning found that they had to rethink their pedagogy to take advantage of the new tools at their disposal. Watch the...
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Linking Youth to New Experiences

I95 Business Magazine  |  Linda Esterson Grasmick’s LYNX Program Transforms Public Education   A few years ago, Laurene Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, launched an effort to innovate America’s high schools. She pledged $50 million, inviting school personnel and business leaders to submit proposals for funding needed to launch new initiatives. While this was in process, talks already were underway at Towson University to determine how to reinvent the traditional public high school in Maryland. The effort, led by Nancy Grasmick, Ph.D., Towson University’s...
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New frontiers in education

The Baltimore Sun  |  Gregory J. Alexander, Contributing writer New frontiers in education New high-tech facilities change the face of learning   Long gone are the days where a professor stands at a lectern at the front of the class, while students feverishly take handwritten notes. Nowhere is this more evident than the new Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center at the University of Maryland. The 187,000-square-foot space, which includes 12 classrooms and nine teaching labs with a total of 1,500 seats, is a stunning building focused on a student-centered approach to...
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Does Redesigning Classrooms Make a Difference to Students?

Chronicle of Higher Education  |  Shannon Najmabadi When Melissa Hayes-Gehrke set foot in a new active-learning classroom here at the University of Maryland, she says it felt like "coming home." Ms. Hayes-Gehrke, a principal lecturer in astronomy on this flagship campus, had begun incorporating active learning into her lectures years ago, asking students to conduct group work and watch instructional videos before coming to class. But she’d taught in a traditional classroom, with rows of seats jammed together and bolted to the floor. They all faced a podium at one end of the...