Putting educational infrastructure to alternative use: IE Business School’s WoW Room
Last Friday I invited Victoriano Izquierdo, a friend of many years and founder of Graphext, to attend a session of my Corporate Communication Management Program at IE Business School held in our WoW Room, a virtual classroom consisting of a 45 square meter videowall made up of 48 monitors arranged in a U shape. But this session would put the WoW room to a very different use to the one it was designed for.
IE Business School WoW Room was launched in October 2016 to take online teaching to a new level. Designed to bridge the gap between face-to-face and online teaching, it provides a classroom experience to IE students anywhere in the world with a Chrome browser and a reasonable internet connection, allowing the teacher to teach under normal classroom conditions: filmed by a camera that captures our every movement, we can move freely in the space at the same time as we see our students’ faces in close up, creating a deeper classroom dynamic. At the same time, rather than just throwing a question out there, we can also carry out surveys and vote in real time, while simultaneously evaluating students’ level of engagement and responding to them individually, thus keeping them on their toes and creating a lively environment. And all this without the need for any camera operators (the camera is motorized and…
