Michael Lampe

Michael Lampe, Instructional Design Specialist, University of South Carolina Upstate

Active Learning Classrooms Increase Student Engagement

  • Colleges and universities that are designing active learning classrooms have an opportunity to take advantage of educational technology that benefits learners of all types.
  • Active learning classrooms allow students to take greater ownership of the educational process by supporting their close participation in class.

“We’ve created a philosophy of display anywhere at any time, whether it’s a faculty member or a student.”

Michael Lampe believes that higher education today has exciting opportunities to increase accessibility for learners of all types while integrating technology into the classroom. The University of South Carolina Upstate, where Lampe is an instructional design specialist, has made great strides in this direction through its development of active learning classrooms. The traditional classroom design assumes that an instructor will be lecturing at a podium while occasionally displaying slides on a single projector to students seated silently in desks facing the podium. An active learning classroom, in contrast, encourages students to interact with each other throughout the class and empowers them to display their content directly from their own personal devices onto monitors placed throughout the classroom.

This is an excerpt from Expanding Educational Opportunity. The eBook was generously sponsored by Blackboard.

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