Interactive Projectors: A Game-Changer for Collaborative Learning in Higher Education
The higher education landscape is changing fast and collaborative learning is emerging as a key paradigm in context of 21st century teaching and learning. As higher education pivots to active, student-centered learning, higher education institutions must embrace technologies that will support such engagement, interaction and collaboration. Interactive projectors represent such a new technology that is promoting new, innovative ways to enhance collaboration within postsecondary classrooms. Interactive projectors enhance the learning experiences in colleges and universities through dynamic presentations, real-time interactions, and hands-on experiences for all students in the classroom.
This article will address how interactive projectors are changing collaborative learning within higher education, as well as their increasing significance and practical value for students and faculty.
What is an Interactive Projector?
Interactive projectors embrace a teaching technology that is infinitely more than typical display devices that facilitate user interaction with projected materials. Through touch-enabled surfaces, pens, and even hand movements, students and educators draw, annotate, zoom, and change a presentation right in front of their classmates in real-time. The ability to interact with content changes a passive learning experience into an engaging, interactive, and collaborative experience that is valuable when employed in group projects, discussions, and active learning..
Characteristics of Interactive Projectors
The features of interactive projectors are differentiating factors from standard projectors, however, the following "must have" features that benefited higher education more than traditional projectors:
- Touch and Pen Input: Most interactive projectors usually come with accurate interactive pens but are also compatible with collaboration with multiple people through "multi-touch".
- Device and Screen Mirroring: Interactive projectors can connect wirelessly to laptops, tablets, and smartphones so students can share their screens and also work on documents with the projector connected to their devices or present multimedia.
- Collaboration Software: Several interactive projectors come equipped with software capable of allowing interaction on documents at the same time while reviewing the content together, some even have the capability of real-time cloud-based software to comment or collaborate directly on top of their presentation.
- Whiteboard capabilities - Interactive projectors allow a flat surface to be turned into a whiteboard and even allow the instructor or the students to write on a board or surface and not require an actual whiteboard or any additional physical objects to interact with the materials..
The Benefits of Interactive Projectors for Collaborative Learning
Creating a collaborative classroom is essential to advanced learning goals, complex problem-solving, and the design thinking process. Interactive projectors enhance the classroom experience and the learning process in a number of different ways.
- Hands-On Learning Engagement Traditional lectures can rarely compete with hands-on learning interactive projectors encourage. For example, students in a biology lecture could have a diagram of a human body projected on the board. They would be able to highlight organs, draw specific parts, and build nervous or cardiovascular systems in real time as a class. Hands-on learning can also assist with difficult concepts, as students are able to access and build an understanding of them.
- Real Time Collaboration Interactive projectors even allow for real time work with documents, presentations, or projects on which multiple students can work at once. This feature is can be very beneficial to group work, allowing students to collaborate on presentations or documents. They will also be able to research, problem solve, or engage with creative or individual projects, as every student in the group could be able to mark up the same slide immediately to annotate, or react to, ideas from a brainstorming session during a marketing seminar.
- Breaking Down the Classroom Walls Interactive projectors often include or offer incorporation of cloud-based collaboration tools which allow students contribute to a project or discussion, regardless of where they are operating from. This is a particularly important element in hybrid or remote learning. At times, students may be off-campus but also contributing actively or asking relevant questions. Interactive projectors allow instructors to create this type of collaborative cycle of discussion and learning in a deeper, more complex and easy to disseminate manner.
- Encouraging Student Led Learning One of the unique features of recent developments in presentation technologies is that an interactive projector allows instructors to manage the student engagement shift from instructor led to student led learning. If we think of a graduate seminar or a class that is specifically discussion based, for example, students can easily add their own research, lead discussions, ask for peer feedback etc. and the interactive features support students' abilities to lead their own lessons, changing the whole engagement experience to a more egalitarian and participatory in a rich, engaging manner..
- Enhancing communication and problem-solving abilities
Interactive projectors facilitate students' ability to communicate meaningfully and work together to solve problems. They allow for multiple individuals to work with the content at the same time, stimulating conversation and having students work together, whether it's a group of engineering students working together to design and prototype a product, or a group of business students working collectively to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy. Interactive projectors enhance the collaborative processes of real-time feedback, brainstorming, and group decision making, fostering student collaborative skills that will transfer and be utilized in their future careers.
Interactive Projectors Uses in Higher Education
Here are some examples of interactive projectors in a few various content areas that promote collaboration:
- STEM Classroom
Within courses that are described in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), interactive projectors are essential for exploring difficult concepts. For instance, in an engineering course, students could be collaborating on CAD designs as they annotate and provide recommendations related to the designs as they project them onto an interactive whiteboard. Professors in medical schools can also use a similar technique by projecting scans of high-resolution scans of human beings to allow students to likewise engage with the images and analyze certain regions of the image while the professor facilitate discussion about diagnosis.
- Business and Marketing Seminars
Predictably, business and marketing students also often collaborate on case studies, marketing campaigns, and the effect of their market trends. Similiarly, interactive projectors allow business and marketing students to project the spreadsheet and perform a comprehensive analysis of the market trends on the projected image while making adjustments to the business model in real time. Again, the interactive projector allows for an engaging collaboration, while providing an engaging learning experience.
- Arts and Humanities
Along the same lines, the arts and humanities students benefit from interactive projectors in classes with a focus on creativity and conversation as part of the learning experience. For example, students sitting in an art history course would work on a collaborative group project highlighting specific areas of a famous painting while annotating the original work and drawing from history to "recreate" areas of the painting digitally. This interaction stimulates conversation and a thoughtful examination of works of art.
- Teacher Preparation and Education Courses
Interactive projectors not only benefit students in their roles as students, they also benefit students as future teachers. In a teacher preparation course, students learned to create interactive lessons, similarly to how they would use digital interactive whiteboards, as well as cooperative group work. Teacher education students have an opportunity to gain comfort using interactive technology with less accountability than professionals, and also clarity for transforming their use as pedagogical professionals.
The Expanding Future of Collaborative Learning through Interactive Projectors
As technology continues to develop, the exciting possibilities for interactive projectors in higher education will continue to expand. As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, it is reasonable to expect they will continue to facilitate even smoother integration with AI-powered tools and gesture control alongside more robust augmented reality features that further blur the lines between the physical classroom and the digital classroom. This will assist in producing ever more immersive collaborative learning environments in which students will collaborate with one another, discover and explore ideas, test proposed solutions, and learn from one experience to the next - in a variety of exciting new ways. In all likelihood, if colleges and universities continue funding technology uses in their environments, we can expect the proliferation of interactive projectors or similar technologies. Institutions of higher education are becoming more aware of the significant role of collaboration in promoting critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to problem solve. Many of these attributes are still in high demand in an accelerating and ever-changing job market..
Conclusion
The advancements in interactive projectors represent not just another piece of technology, it represents a change in and tool for transformational pedagogy. Interactive projectors can fundamentally change the ways in which students and professors interact with content, interact with each other, and learn. Interactive projectors can and should be viewed as a valuable learning tool for higher education due to increased engagement, real-time collaborative opportunities, and to gap the divide between remote learning or engaging with content online, versus experiencing it in-person.
As long as students continue to find value in collaborating and engaging in hands-on learning experiences, interactive projectors will continue to encourage them to interact with content in meaningful and engaging, even rich, learning experiences. As pedagogies evolve, these types of devices will develop a role for technology in the teaching practices of pedagogy in higher education. Engaging students to prepare them not simply to view content or receive content, but to be critical, creative thinkers who apply what they learn, and make their learning their own.
