New classroom designs ‘the future of learning,’

Cliff Whittingstall says he’s working on classrooms that represent “the future of learning.”

Whittingstall, a managing partner at PBK, a firm that specializes in higher education design, says on the Cutting EDge podcast that he’s developing future-proof designs for a rapidly changing technological environment.

“We try to create classroom environments that are flat,” Whittingstall says. “Think of every wall as a front of the classroom in many ways.”

The firm is working with Galveston College, a community college in the Gulf Coast of Texas, to design a new Health Sciences Education Center. Another project, to help train teachers to teach special needs children at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, is designed to be “fully immersive,” Whittingstall says.

“Every surface of the room is a big, large projected screen and it interacts with you so you’re fully immersed in the environment,” he says. “To me, you can’t do [this kind of learning] in a tiered lecture hall. I actually think this is the next level of virtual reality.”

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