By Rebecca V. Frazee and Lisa Stephens of FLEXspace.org, featuring Jodie Penrod, Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine 

To browse details, images, floor plans, and more from spaces featured in this column, plus hundreds more, log in to FLEXspace.org and visit the Gallery “HEAV –  HEAV – Higher Ed AV Magazine Feature”

Rebecca had the pleasure of speaking with Jodie Penrod, Senior Director of Technology at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (HCOM), Office of Medical Education Technology in Athens, Ohio. Jodie was excited to share how they’re taking active learning to the next level using a software-based system to connect instructors and students across three campuses in person and remotely. 

This past year, the school opened a new medical education building, and currently is implementing a connected curriculum with eight ‘Active Learning Classrooms’ across all three Heritage College locations in Athens, Dublin, and Cleveland for campus-to-campus connectivity. These ALC’s offer total flexibility to faculty, whether the space needs to be reconfigured for different on-site class sizes and class types or if an instructor needs to teach to a fully remote or hybrid classroom of students. The ‘connected classrooms’ use a combination of AV over IP, video conferencing, and a software-based AV system called T1V ThinkHub Education and MultiSite to connect classrooms across all three campuses. 

Here’s a short video of the project. 

How it started

After receiving a ‘transformational gift,’ from the Ohio Heritage Foundation (OHF), the school was able to expand to Dublin and Cleveland over the last eight years, and open a new medical education school at the Athens, OH campus (around $65M) this past year. They wanted to incorporate innovative, leading-edge technology in the classrooms that would enable them to increase faculty engagement with students, connect remote and in-person students and faculty, and leverage the investment in expert faculty, and extend reach to more students.

Prior to this new system, they already had a curriculum that connected Athens, Cleveland, and Dublin. Utilizing technology, the Heritage College was able to expand to three campuses while maintaining faculty hiring growth to about 14% because those expert clinical faculty are hard to get. They determined that they could grow twice the size and extend to the other two campuses through video conferencing. For instance, clinical faculty in Cleveland could be teaching the students in Athens and Dublin. This approach would save on costs of faculty, and enable the school to recruit faculty from different clinical systems across the state of Ohio, and beyond. 

The old hardware-based ‘pod’ system was resource intensive, inflexible

Before COVID, when they were looking at building the connection across the three campuses, they had staff and faculty at the three different sites using a hardware-based video conferencing system.  It was very hands-on and very resource intensive, with lots of tech and lots of manual effort. Jodie shared, “My team was manually connecting the conference rooms and monitoring calls – If you wanted to use the system, you had to contact the room scheduler to book the room, then contact the video conferencing team so they could set up, and then run the session, make the handoffs, etc. For the classroom activities, it was a scripted video production, because we were sending and switching video and content, so the faculty had little wiggle room to engage with the students ‘off script’ so to speak.” 

A field trip to Charlotte, NC sealed the deal

They wanted faculty to engage more with students on the fly. “We wanted them to be able to do more team teaching. We wanted faculty to have more control, more autonomy, more flexibility, to be able to schedule their own meetings, use their own tools without having administrative staff get in the middle. We worked with T1V, and our tech integrator, Root Integrated Systems. At first, we thought, ‘Oh, we don’t need smart boards,’ but they encouraged us to go to the showroom in Charlotte, NC. So our CFO and I took a road trip and we were blown away by the technology.”

Flexibility, interactivity, plus full room control all in one

With this new software-based system, in the classroom, you have the instructor station and several student stations. The instructor station has an 85-inch touchscreen that uses a digital ‘canvas’ software, and that writable digital ‘canvas’ can be 20 times the size of the physical touch screen. You can use your finger or a stylus to write in one area, swipe to move that writing area out of the way, show all of it at once, make it full screen, etc. 

Then, you can have additional on-campus classrooms each equipped with its own instructor and student stations. You may also have remote students using an app on their laptop or tablet, as well as other remote faculty, guest speakers, or clinicians. Using a software-driven ‘multi-site’ system increases engagement and collaboration for student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions. 

For example, an instructor in Athens can write on the ‘canvas,’ and the instructors in Cleveland and Dublin can add to that same ‘canvas’ space interchangeably. The instructor in Dublin might share her screen with students in her classroom, but also share with the student stations in the Athens and Cleveland classrooms, “expanding your footprint beyond the borders of the classroom.” Furthermore, that content can be seen by all participants in person and remotely. “But even more, we can pipe in work from the remote participants, so remote students can use the app to collaborate with their group if they’re stuck home that day.” 

You can provide 3 sources of content remotely — interactive content, presenter content (from the instructor and the students), plus live video. Faculty and students can collaborate between instructor and student stations in the classroom, to instructor and student stations in other classrooms, and to remote participants. Students can annotate together, whether all in the same room, or in different locations. Instructors can connect with students, wherever they are, to better understand what they’re working on. “If you consider all the hardware and all the programming it would take to make this happen otherwise, it would be really expensive and hard to achieve.”

Jodie added, “With the old system, we had a mixture of a lecture and ‘pod’ environment, which worked well. But to expand and take it to the next level, this software-driven system enables high levels of flexibility and interactivity across all three campuses, and provides an expanded active learning classroom experience that doesn’t rely on a bunch of complex switchers and hardware to work, and doesn’t require all the handoffs.” The system also supports full-fledged annotation and content sharing. “One of the benefits for us is that you have annotation plus full room control in one package, and the app so you can wirelessly connect any device and send to the larger device. It’s super flexible. You can do something locally, or host a fully-connected event.”

Connected Classrooms in Athens, Cleveland, and Dublin, OH Campuses of HCOM 

Active Learning Classroom in Athens, Ohio

One year out, it’s going well

The medical school went live with the system in Fall 2021, when everyone was all back on site, and now they’ve just completed the first year in a new building. So far, they’ve had a very successful year.  “T1V was able to customize to our needs. For instance, we wanted to auto-populate all student stations onto the digital canvas, and were able to customize that for a very low cost. We’ve been able to use it to support remote instruction during COVID, which of course ultimately affects student success, especially in medical school where it is very important not to miss class.

That’s been the amazing part and the nice thing going forward – this gives faculty more flexibility, so they can build their canvas remotely if they need to, whether they’re teaching from home, on the road, or onsite from a clinical location. This enables so much more interactivity, so many more ways to share information and incorporate so much more into clinical learning that is not bound to the physical room.” 

Expanding on their success so far

Rightfully so, Jodie is proud and happy to share what they’ve accomplished at HCOM. “Heritage Hall, our building, is the leading edge for learning spaces at our university and in higher education in general. I think we have the most complex and multifunctional active learning classroom setup out there. We will continue to leverage that connected multi-site technology and expand on it. It’s been nice working with a smaller company like T1V, for the flexibility and ability to customize to meet our needs as they evolve.”

In a recent article for Educause, Jodie writes, “In addition to a future-proof physical environment, it was also important for the Heritage College to consider the future of learning as the physical and virtual worlds collide in medical education. For example, training in telehealth needs to be a viable option for portions of the medical education curriculum since the healthcare industry provides and promotes this service. The HyFlex (hybrid-flexible) course design model combines physical and virtual spaces and face-to-face and online learning. Supporting participants, students, and instructors in joining the learning activity physically or virtually and ensuring that everyone has a similar experience were essential parts of future-proofing our learning space design.” 

You can read more details about this project in the Educause article here. And login to FLEXspace where Jodie has added a case study with photos and more details of these spaces.

Currently, I serve as the Senior Director, Technology at Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. I am a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Professional in Healthcare Information Management Systems (CPHIMS), ITIL-Foundation Certified, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certified. I hold a Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering, a Master’s of Science in Systems Engineering and pursuing a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from Ohio University, with a focus on hybrid learning to support diversity, equity, and inclusion and student success.

In my professional life, I have an engineering educational background, however, most of my career has been centered around business process analysis that leads to technology design and implementation, specifically for healthcare and higher education.  My interests include learning spaces and technology, operational efficiency through the use of technology and tailoring the classroom experience to optimize student success.

The growing FLEXspace community is always looking for the latest examples of innovative and effective learning spaces. Please share your campus spaces by logging into FLEXspace.org, and contact Rebecca or Lisa if you would like to be featured in an upcoming issue of Higher Ed AV magazine.  

The FLEXspace Team

LISA STEPHENS, Ph.D.
Assistant Dean, Digital & Online Education
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, The University at Buffalo
Project Director, FLEXspace.org 

Lisa serves as Assistant Dean at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences leading the Office of Digital & Online Education, and also serves as Senior Strategist for Academic Innovation in the Office of the SUNY Provost.  She enjoys an appointment in the UB Department of Communication as an Adjunct Associate Professor. Her SUNY portfolio includes leadership of FLEXspace.org™ and serves as the SUNY Partner Manager for Coursera.

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Rebecca teaches in the Learning Design and Technology program at San Diego State University and is the FLEXspace.org Manager. She enjoys experimenting with new technology tools and techniques to support active learning and team collaboration in higher ed and the workplace. Rebecca is a singer and songwriter and has been having fun with asynchronous ‘socially distanced’ recording projects this year. Contact Rebecca at rfrazee@sdsu.edu, and Twitter at @rebeccafrazee.

The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange (FLEXspace.org) is an award-winning community and open digital repository for higher ed that houses a growing collection of user-contributed content “by campuses for campuses,” with detailed examples of formal and informal learning spaces ranging from multimedia studios, maker spaces, computer labs, hybrid/flexible classrooms, and huddle spaces to large exhibit spaces, simulation labs and renovated lecture halls. FLEXspace was launched in 2012 as a collaboration between SUNY, the CSU Cal State University system, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and has since grown to include over 5000 members from 1400 campuses around the world, with PennState joining the partnership in 2019. FLEXspace won the Campus Technology Innovators Award in 2016, and the California Higher Education (CHEC) Collaborative Conference Focus on Efficiency Award in 2018.

FLEXspace users include practitioners, experts, and decision-makers in higher education, K-12, libraries, and museums who are focused on campus planning and facilities, learning technology, A/V systems integration, instructional design, teaching, and research. The FLEXspace portal provides a sophisticated suite of features that enables users to document and showcase their own campus learning spaces, share research, best practices, and tools for planning.