Our surroundings have a profound effect on our mood, the way we work and how we engage with others during any given day. This spring, as sunshine and warmer days lift spirits across campus, several projects will also near completion. New buildings and refurbished spaces are sure to be places where students, staff and faculty can feel safe, productive and connected.
The much anticipated Library Technology Center is scheduled to open in August and be fully occupied by fall. Upon completion, the three-story LTC will include a two-level library, a 378 seat auditorium with a state of the art presentation system, six “smart” classrooms, 10 group study rooms, an open computer lab and a coffee bar. Many of the amenities of the LTC will become valuable resources for the community at large, while others will be modern yet intimate spaces for our college community. Simply put, the LTC will be a place where students will want to spend their free time, study, participate in student clubs and make new friends.
In just weeks, the Downtown Campus will also have a common area to call its own – a fully refurbished kitchen. Eventually, the bookstore at the DTC will be moved to a new, more accessible location on the first floor. Renovations are set to begin in the fall.
In fact, fall 2008 will be a busy time for all of J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. Burnette Hall will also see changes – mostly in the way of chillers, boilers and HVAC. Eventually, Burnette Hall will have a newly designed main entrance and renovated restrooms. The courtyard that adjoins Burnette and Georgiadis Halls is also under design to include new landscaping, brick pavers and art.
The new Workforce Training and Technology Center is due to break ground this fall as well. It will replace space leased at North Run for the Community College Workforce Alliance as well as the Central Administration Building (CAB) – moving both to the Parham Road Campus.
All of the new and refurbished spaces at Reynolds will accommodate our modern way of living and learning. Contemporary spaces will be dedicated to provide staff and faculty with professional development opportunities, to allow College friends and community members to participate in College events and to afford students the latest technologies.
Six new computer classrooms add comfort and new technologies to the teaching and learning environment
Seventh in a series of articles highlighting features of the new Library Technology Center Perhaps the most important feature of the new Library Technology Center opening in the fall semester will be six new computer classrooms. For the first time the Parham Road Campus will have new classrooms specifically designed for the personal computer. While there have been 17 different computer classrooms in Burnette Hall for nearly a decade, all of these classrooms are the same size as when the building was originally built in 1974 when most classrooms were designed to hold 25 tablet armchairs for traditional lecture classes. As computers became both the subject and the tool for teaching, the tablet armchairs were pulled out and tables and computers were crammed in, resulting in awkward and often uncomfortable teaching and learning environments. All that will change in the new Library Technology Center's classrooms. There are six classrooms that will be permanently outfitted with desktop computers. All will have square footage significantly larger than the largest computer classroom in Burnette Hall. Two of the computer classrooms will accommodate 25 students, and four will accommodate 31 students.
For the first time the college will be using Dell mini-tower OptiPlex 755 computers in its classrooms. Each computer will have a 19-inch flat panel monitor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, a 160-gigabyte hard drive, and a 16X DVD+/-RW drive. A new feature will be Dell's 19-in-1 Media Card Reader, which uses a USB 2.0 interface to access a variety of storage cards including Compact Flash Type I and II, IBM Micro Drive, Smart Media, Multi Media Card, SD Memory Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Pro Duo, xD Picture Card, Mini SD Card, and Reduced Size Multi Media Card. In short, no matter which type of mobile memory device teachers and students have, it should be easily attachable to the PCs.
Just as important as the computers, will be the tables on which they rest. All of the computer classrooms will feature tables specifically designed for computers: SmartDesks, featuring semi-recessed spaces for the 19-inch monitors, giving students unobstructed sight lines for the projection screen and instructors a clearer look at students' faces. There will also be wider spaces for books and other materials that students bring to class. Each classroom will include at least two Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant desks. The instructor's desk in each of the six classrooms will include even wider desktop space for notes and space to work one-on-one with students, plus an articulating keyboard and mouse tray that can be raised and lowered so that an instructor can either stand or sit and still comfortably use the keyboard and mouse.
Of course each classroom will have a ceiling-mounted data projector. We will be using a Sanyo PLC-XT25 projector with 4500 lumens, the brightest at the college, enabling instructors to keep the lighting at full level and still enable students to see the data projector. The motorized projection screens will be 69-inches by 92-inches. Because the rooms will be larger than current classrooms, each room will also have ceiling-mounted speakers and an audio system with wireless lavalier and handheld microphones to ensure that students in the back of the room will be able to hear the instructor. Perhaps the most dramatic new teaching technology in the computer classrooms will be the Sympodium ID350 interactive controller, which will be connected to each instructor's computer. This tablet will enable the instructor to control the computer or write in digital ink with the tablet's pen tool. Pen tools on the console allow the teacher to change ink color and activate erasers without launching software or toolbars. Any annotations added to the screen can be displayed on the projection screen, captured, saved and later shared with students for use after the class session ends.
With so many new features and new instructional technologies, anyone teaching in the new Library Technology Center will need lessons on how to use these new technologies effectively. The Technology Training department will be using the new staff training classroom, which will have all of the same technologies installed, to help faculty master the new capabilities of these new classrooms. Finally, once these new classrooms are opened In the fall, we will be pulling several of the most awkward and uncomfortable computer classrooms in Burnette Hall off-line and after a refurbishment returning them to their original traditional lecture purposes.
CAMPUS CONSTRUCTION UPDATE
November 2007
Construction updates, November 2007 Major finishing for the Library & Technology Center has moved indoors as workers move projects forward to complete the building for use in Fall 2008.
New library instruction classroom will yield more info-savvy students
When the new Library Technology Center opens on the Parham Road Campus in spring 2008, among the features that will be of greatest benefit to both students and faculty will be the college's first computer classroom dedicated to instructing students in the use of advanced information resources. While the college's professional librarians have long led sessions on using the library for students through library orientation sessions, these opportunities have been limited by the availability of general computer classrooms. On the main floor of the library in the new Library Technology Center, there will be, for the first time at the college, a classroom dedicated to housing classes on how to use the complex new information resources available in the library of the 21st century. While many students are very savvy about technology, many are unaware of the effective use of the plethora of information available on the Internet, especially for academic purposes.
The library instruction classroom will have 24 student computers and the same range of instructional equipment that will be found in the new building's regular classrooms: a ceiling-mounted data projector, interactive Smartboards and other advanced teaching technologies. The librarians will offer a combination of special open-enrollment sessions throughout the semester for students in any JSRCC course as well as special sessions arranged with faculty members who will bring their students to the library for special instruction connected to an assignment in their courses. In addition, the classroom may be used to offer library orientation to new students during the college's expanded SOAR (Student Orientation Advising & Registration) sessions and other orientation sessions designed to introduce students to the resources available to help them succeed at Reynolds.
Even though the new Library Technology Center will not open until the spring, the library will begin this fall expanding its offering of library instruction for students. Look for a schedule of sessions in the Fall 2007 class schedule and on the library's web page at www.reynolds.edu/library And neither faculty nor students need to wait till the new building opens to arrange for special library instruction sessions. You can do that today on the library's web site or by stopping by the library on any campus and speaking with one of the college's librarians.
New staff training classroom will help raise faculty and staff to new levels of technology use
When the new Library Technology Center opens on the Parham Road Campus in spring 2008, for the first time in more than five years the college will have a dedicated technology training classroom. Long-time employees will remember the Center for Advanced Technology (aka the CAT Lab) in the old Instructional Technologies & Distance Education (IT&DE) area at North Run. That space was shut down because of budget cuts in February 2003, and since then all our technology training has had to be held in regular college classrooms, essentially limiting technology training to the afternoons or other times when the classrooms were not being used for credit instruction.
With the new Library Technology Center, the college will again have a space dedicated to housing advanced professional development opportunities (PDOs) for faculty and staff. The flexible schedule will allow us to hold half-day sessions during the morning and afternoon or even full-day sessions.
The space will be located in Room 338 on the third floor adjacent to the offices of the Technology Training department and the Center for Distance Learning. It will accommodate 12 people plus an instructor and will be equipped with 13 desktop computers, color laser printer, a ceiling-mounted data projector, and the full range of advanced technologies that will be found in all of the other new classrooms in the LTC: Smartboards, ceiling-mounted document cameras, and more. When future new classroom technologies begin to be deployed at the college, they will first be deployed in this staff training room so instructors can practice using the equipment in a rehearsal environment.
The dedicated staff training classroom with its flexible schedule will also provide a venue for delivering the full range of technology courses (ITEC) in the college's professional development curriculum.
Scheduling of this staff training room will be coordinated by the Manager of Technology Training, but it will be available for use by all units at the college for delivering professional development sessions.
Academic Computing Center to replace cramped open lab
Prime among the many new spaces in the Library Technology Center, now under construction on the Parham Road Campus, will be an expanded Academic Computing Center. That's the new name for what used to be known as the Open Computer Lab. Currently located in Room 115 in Burnette Hall adjacent to the Parham library, it is hardly "open," with 50 computer stations crowded into small rooms that were designed originally as the college's Language Lab and Learning Lab in the 1970s before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had even dreamed of the desktop PC.
The new Academic Computing Center will be located on the entry level of the Library Technology Center. There will be seating for 75 students at comfortable SmartDesks designed specifically for computers with plenty of space for keyboards, mice, books and notebooks. Gone will be today's cramped, claustrophobia-inducing desktops.
Several of the desks will have special include ADA features to expand student accessibility.
Students entering the Academic Computing Center will be greeted at a nicely appointed reception counter where they can check in and receive assistance using the Center's wide range of technology resources. Just past the reception area, students will find an expanded printing counter. In addition, the Academic Computing Center will feature three large plasma screens where rotating messages about available services and college activities will always be in view. The Academic Computing Center will have the same smart projection technologies to be found in the LTC's regular computer classrooms, so demonstrations can be offered to large groups on the many new technology resources that the college will have to enhance teaching and learning.
Group study rooms will offer students new venues for learning
A significant new feature of the Library Technology Center will be 10 group study rooms. Six of the group study rooms will be located in the lower level of the library, and another four will be located in the building's third floor, which will be the main instructional section and will feature seven new classrooms. Each group study room will feature a comfortable table and chairs for four to eight students and a wall-mounted flat-screen monitor, where students can work together on computer projects, doing web-based research (using the ubiquitous wireless network) or view DVD's and other digital media. There are no similar rooms anywhere in the college's existing facilities, so this will give students and faculty an important new opportunity for collaborative learning that heretofore had to be done in cramped corners in the existing library, in noisy commons areas, or in a rarely vacant classroom.
The group study rooms should also be a boon to the college's increasing focus on active, cooperative learning found in such strategic projects as the Learning Communities initiative. Group study rooms have been an important feature of the Library Technology Center's design from its original concept and was mentioned repeatedly in the vision for the Learning Commons refined in 2005. The college's Learning Commons Advisory Team has developed procedures for the use of these rooms. They will be available for currently enrolled students and staff. They will need to be reserved in advance via the web, telephone, or in-person at the Circulation Desk in the Learning Commons. For purposes of safety and security, they will remain locked when not in use. Reservations will be limited to two hours, with one renewal if no other group needs the room. Study rooms that have not been reserved will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis. As time goes by, of course, these procedures may be changed to ensure that the rooms can be used to their best advantage to meet their intended goal of providing an opportunity to enhance student engagement and improve student success. Those are, of course, the goals of the Library Technology Center as a whole.
Construction updates, May 2007
Reynolds college recently embarked upon several expansion
projects that will add much needed classroom and laboratory space and
enhance the aesthetic appeal, functionality and learning environment of
our Parham Road and
Downtown campuses. Over the past two years, nearly all classrooms on all
three campuses have been renovated—receiving new paint, carpet, and
ceiling tiles, as well as new furniture and instructional technology. A
significant percentage of offices have also been renovated.
With master planning on the Parham Road
Campus complete, some obvious changes—and some not so obvious
changes—are occurring or have occurred right before our eyes:
Burnette Hall on the Parham Road Campus will receive a
comprehensive renovation to include science laboratories, building
systems and accessibility requirements (ADA). A request for a
similar renovation to Georgiadis Hall is pending, as well as a
request for the renovation of the Downtown Campus building. A new
Workforce Training and Technology Center with an administrative
component is under design and will replace space leased for
Community Workforce Alliance at
North Run as well as the Central Administration Building, moving
both to the Parham Road Campus. New interior and external signage
will be installed as renovations are completed and new buildings
come online. Furthermore, preliminary discussions have commenced
regarding the development of an auto body repair instructional
laboratory on the Western Campus and the concept for an Eastern
Henrico Campus is being refined.
“Our goal in all these renovations is to achieve
physical facilities that are modern and accommodate services to
students that are easily located and which by design, invite
students to linger longer on the campus to pursue academic or social
activities,” said Tim Brown, vice president for finance and
administration.
