One of Britain’s newer universities, Northampton is driving a revolution in which students are empowered to be active participants in their learning.
The university’s new Waterside Campus in the heart of the town has been designed to support Active Blended Learning (ABL), a new approach developed at Northampton that merges face-to-face teaching with the best practices of digital education.
Head of IT Services Rob Palfreman had the task of supporting this new approach with appropriate technology.
“Traditional teaching approaches require students to be no more than passive: large lecture theatres with rows of students and a lecturer at the front broadcasting to them — we believe that this isn’t the most effective way for our students to learn,” Palfreman explains. “Instead of broadcast lectures, we will have flexible teaching spaces for more intimate, collaborative and smaller-group-based activities.”
The teaching rooms are equipped with digital screens and supporting technology to facilitate collaborative learning.
Almost all courses now have associated “tools of the trade” software applications. Many of these are resource-hungry, requiring high-resolution graphics or large amounts of processing power.
“Traditionally, you would select a room, fill it with 30 high-end workstations, and install the software required for a specific course,” Palfreman says. “You end up hard-wiring a course to a room, and that restricts course numbers to the room’s capacity. For periods of the year, the rooms are empty and the resources are under-utilised. But at peak-times the machines are over-subscribed. It’s hugely inefficient, and you also have the large overhead of managing software installations on thousands of machines all over the university.”
Researching the options for a suitably flexible and versatile technology, Palfreman and his team decided on a virtual desktop approach. Systems Integrator and Gold Citrix Solution Advisor XMA introduced Palfreman and his team to Citrix.
“Citrix is considered best-of-breed as a technology,” Palfreman says. “But we also wanted a strategic relationship with a supplier that not only had the right technology but also a similar set of values — one that understood our vision for education and shared our values of social responsibility. We found that in Citrix.”
The new campus uses Citrix Workspace, which enables students to learn at their own pace wherever they are.
“Citrix gives us a secure application delivery method, even for high-end applications like CAD etc., so that an individual can use their own device — whether that’s a Chromebook, laptop, or even an iPad — to run high-end software wherever they are,” Palfreman says.
Pre-set, independent learning activities are a core pillar of ABL. Students complete online, multi-media activities in preparation for class so that contact time with tutors is used to best effect. When on campus, students often work in small collaborative groups before presenting their work back to the larger class. In this way, they also learn valuable skills for the workplace along the way.
“Citrix is fundamental to supporting the student experience and our Active Blended Learning model,” Palfreman says. “With Citrix, students feel the whole town is their campus. Without it, we just couldn’t achieve the mobility that we want to give students.”
