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Auditorium from the balcony
Auditorium looking to the south
Auditorium looking toward balcony from center stage
Classroom Expansion
University of Oregon's proposed Classroom Expansion project at Straub and Earl Halls
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Classroom Expansion
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May 14, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Looks wonderful, except the seats seem to be scrunched awfully close together. Can there be another inch or two between seats?
May 14, 2013 at 6:02 pm
These desks are extremely discriminatory to students who are not the “standard size.” This will just cram students into the classroom like sardines and make learning nearly impossible if a student is too tall or too heavy. Just because their body shape may not be ideal, it doesn’t mean that they should have to be so uncomfortable in class. This stuff is distracting for students, and will be exactly what results from a layout like this.
May 14, 2013 at 9:31 pm
Would like to see more renovations like MacKenzie and Lillis… The “desk/table” is fixed and the chairs are free to move. That is much more accommodating to those of us who are not model thin. My experience with tablet style desks: a) tablet top is too close to the body for comfortable note taking; b) too low for those of us who don’t slouch; c) squishes the tummy for those who are large and/or pregnant; d) WAY. TOO. SMALL!!! It doesn’t fit a full sized notebook let alone a computer… or coffee. More and more students are bringing laptops to class to take notes/follow lecture power points, so outlets in the table for “plugging in” would be a plus. Also, I do not sit in a desk chair in the normal fashion. I am short with a 23-inch inseam, therefore my feet generally do not touch the ground when sitting in a classroom seat (well, almost any seat). When my knees are at the edge of the chair, the back is a good 4 – 6 inches away from my back. When possible, I twist the chair so I can sit with a corner between my knees and one leg off the side and one off the front of the seat. I have better access to the floor and I don’t wind up sacral-sitting and having a sore tailbone by the end of lecture.
The technology needs to be SUPER user friendly! As in, a caveman can figure it out easy. I find most of the instructors are not techno savvy and have a hard time with all the electronics. I am paying a LOT of money to attend classes and would like more with Q & A instead of watching the instructor struggle with the equipment.
As pretty as the above picture is, I firmly believe that a fixed table/free chair is better for student comfort. Scratch that… I KNOW it is.
May 14, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Hello,
I am the organizer of many public lectures on campus that draw large audiences. From an event organizer’s standpoint, this hall is a welcome addition. I urge you to consider the following:
1) Invest in a high-quality projector with a good bulb.
2) PLEASE make sure that the infrastructure is compatible with our efforts to live stream our lectures to other rooms on campus when necessary. Consult with CMET to make sure it’s compatible.
3) Good lighting for the speaker is important.
4) If possible, make sure that the sound equipment is compatible with hearing-impared devices. We recently had a request from a hearing-impaired woman for “an induction loop system compatible with audience members’ telecoils”
5) Please put in two cameras, so when we are videotaping and live streaming lectures, conferences, classes, etc., one camera can be on the speaker and another can be on the screen, the audience, the person asking a question, etc.
Above all, please consult with the technical staff who we rely on to make us look good at our public events – EMU Event Services and CMET. They are the video, sound, technical wizards who we expect to make our speakers shine. Please consult them about what “plays well” with the existing equipment on campus!
Thank you!
May 15, 2013 at 1:52 am
While elegant, I worry that this auditorium seems expressly designed to stuff in lots of students as possible for passive receipt of “information.” It’s probably impossible to structure a large room with movable chairs / desks, but at least we should have chairs that swivel around to enable small group discussions among students. A lot of us (faculty) put lots of work into “active” learning in lectures, which has real and measurable impact on student performance, and the design of classrooms does a lot to either help or hurt this.
Thanks, by the way, for opening this site to comments!
Prof. Raghuveer Parthasarathy, Physics
May 15, 2013 at 5:36 am
As another student who is “large” (>6′ >300#) let me note how miserable I find the classes in the fixed seat hells err halls. Scrunched into seats designed by someone who thought airliners waste space. But by far the worst are the postage card sized “desks” that won’t actually close if you are too fat. And you are expected to balance a notebook, clicker, printed slides, coffee cup, audio recorder, molecule model, and whatever else on top of a space the size of a dessert plate.
May 22, 2013 at 9:14 pm
I’m imagining the math department using this room (as it probably will) to teach, for example, Math 241-242-243.
(1) In math classes, one of the important activities is solving problems. This often requires a significant amount of display space, and what is displayed needs to be legible to students at the furthest distance from the screen. I’m guessing that the students furthest from the front display space are 80-90 feet away.
I would like to suggest trying to rake the seats more steeply (both below and in the balcony) in order to move those students a little closer to the screen and to the lecturer. If the distance could be reduced to 60-70′ that would make it easier to use the room for purposes (like mathematics lectures) that involve displaying a significant amount of written information.
(2) While a projection screen is clearly mandatory these days, blackboards or whiteboard are also desirable if the maximum distance can be kept to something usable. There is enough ceiling height at the front of the room to allow three pairs of 8-12′ vertical sliding blackboards.
These two changes can go a long way from making the room a _possible_ place to have a big math lecture to making it an _ideal_ place to have a big math lecture.