Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Eberly Center  ›  Instrumented Classrooms: Request for Use

Instrumented, technology-enhanced, active learning classrooms

The Eberly Center provides two instrumented technology-enhanced, active learning classrooms in the Tepper Quad. These rooms are designed to capture rich data on classroom interactions and behaviors that can be used for (a) formative feedback on your teaching and your students’ learning, (b) exploring the effect of a new technology or pedagogy you wish to incorporate in your course, (c) conducting educational research in a real class setting, and more!

Tepper 1308 has 64-seat capacity, and Tepper 1306 has 24-seat capacity. Both rooms have the following features:

  • ability to collect rich data such as video and audio
  • educational technologies including interactive screens and document camera
  • modern classroom design including easily moveable furniture and whiteboard walls
  • a flexible platform for building new sensor and recording devices

If you would like to use one of these rooms, please contact eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu and and a member of our team will reach out.

Note: The Registrar also has access to book Tepper 1308 for courses.

Potential Use Cases for the Instrumented TEL Classrooms:

There are a variety of ways CMU instructors and researchers might imagine leveraging the instrumented classrooms. Below are a few examples:

Do you want to...

The Eberly Center already provides feedback on teaching and learning through observations and early course feedback services. The instrumented classrooms expand these services by enabling us to collect additional data for you, e.g., related to your teaching, classroom activities, technology use, and more. For example, do you want to implement or refine your active learning approaches? These new data sources provide information about student and instructor behaviors that was previously unavailable.  And Eberly colleagues are available to support you in interpreting the results and in consulting with you on potential data-informed adjustments.

These classrooms offer flexible furniture and various technologies, including large interactive monitors for collaborative student use, movable whiteboards, document cameras, and video conferencing capabilities. If you’d like to explore creative uses of these features, we will help you with designing and assessing your new instructional classroom activities.

Many instructors want to incorporate a technology tool in their course, but they don’t know how well it may work, especially on the first try. Other instructions have built their own technology tool and want to test it in the context of a real course. In either case, the instrumented classrooms enable audio and video data collection that can be useful as you pilot a new technology tool and seek to assess its use and effectiveness in your course.

The instrumented classrooms may be a good option for conducting classroom research. For example, an instructor might want to test whether a teaching approach improves learning. The advantage of conducting research in these rooms is the availability of rich digital data sources, e.g., video and audio from a number of class sessions throughout the semester. These data can complement other types of learning assessments.

Researchers may want to use the highly modular aspects of the instrumented classrooms to explore new instrumentation systems. These might include sensors, live displays, integration of online and in-person interactions, sensor-based socio-technical systems, and so on. If your work has moved beyond lab development and needs a rich classroom environment for testing and piloting, these classrooms might work for you.

Classroom Request

If you would like to discuss using one of these instrumented classrooms, contact us at eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu and a member of our team will be in touch.