WSU Opens On-Line Building Todd Hall Gets $17 Million In High-Tech Renovations

A day after Microsoft let loose the new Windows 95 computer operating program, Washington State University opened the doors to its newly computerized Todd Hall.

To hear school officials gush, one might think the classroom building’s $17 million renovation is as revolutionary as Bill Gates’ latest brainchild.

The building’s 536-seat auditorium features an Orwellian projection screen on which instructors can use the latest in multimedia technology, a blend of text, sound, graphics and video.

Each desk in the “electronic meeting room” has linked computer terminals through which students and meeting participants can type information to be projected to the rest of the room. In a variation on the clandestine, cross-classroom note, participants can also communicate with each other.

With all 35 classrooms connected to the Internet, WSU’s relative isolation is now moot, said President Sam Smith.

“Geography becomes irrelevant,” he said. “You can work with a person in Prague, you can work with a person across the hallway, you can work with a person anywhere else.”

The furnishings are pretty posh, too. One executive-style swivel chair in a seminar room costs $210.

“These are typical classroom chairs across the country,” Smith insisted.

Nice seats aside, the renovation’s most obvious benefit to students may well be that it reopens the university’s largest classroom building - home to 30 percent of the school’s classes - after a year and a half. Without the use of the 140,000-square-foot building, which sits in the core of the campus across from the student union and library, students were being shuffled to classes across campus at odd hours.

But the building’s chief benefit lies in moving from a classroom environment based on what Smith called an 1895 model of a lecturer with chalk to a version custom-tailored for today’s technologically advanced MTV generation.

“If you can hold out your arm,” Smith said, sticking his arm straight out from his side, “and an individual can walk under your arm, they’re probably more technologically advanced than you are.”

“The time has come for faculty to rethink the teaching-learning relationship and how computer technology fits into that,” said Kathy Beerman, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition.

With multimedia lectures, Beerman said she has been able to better illustrate a variety of scientific concepts where before she could only say, “Picture this.”

She has also seen test score averages jump as much as 6 percent, with traditionally low-scoring students faring particularly well.

While Beerman teaches a relatively rote-oriented subject, instructors in classes requiring more critical thinking skills are taking advantage of the technology as well, said Geoff Gamble, vice provost for academic affairs.

“The successes that Kathy is talking about are being replicated across the curriculum,” he said.

, DataTimes