The University of Newcastle has a brand-new collaborative teaching space in The Engineering Precinct on their Callaghan Campus! The engineers have seen the many similar collaboration spaces in the NEWSPACE building in Newcastle CBD and now have one of their own, which they are very excited about!!

Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) is a form of teaching that the university has embraced in recent years. In a room like this there is great opportunity for rich collaboration in teams and between teams, which is perfect for different types of engineering experiments and simulations. There are student pods that can seat up to 8 and these can also be easily split into smaller tables that accommodate 4. The architect EJE was instrumental in bringing the TEAL vision to life and close collaboration between EJE, konnectus, and the services engineers was needed to ensure all technology items was seamlessly integrated into the built environment.

Students can work in groups on the individual pods and then share their work digitally with other pods throughout the room. This is extremely useful given the project type work that they do. The lecturer can also push or pull content with any of the individual pods and share with the entire room on the main projection displays.

Konnectus worked closely with the University AVS and IT teams, as well as, with the manufacturer Crestron to bring this breakthrough design to reality using the Crestron NVX product. This was the first of many new teaching spaces featuring the NVX solution at the Engineering Precinct, and the technology will also soon be implemented at the Mathematics building and other UTS faculties.