How do we form community? (This was a topic we discussed before the spring quarter began too, but we’re sure you have thought about it more now, and have additional ideas.)
like I begin all my classes, in the online version we will continue in the first class to break into groups to discuss how to have respectful discussions and what to do when sensitive topics come up. I give the students agency to set their own boundaries on these issues. We will simply discuss how being online might be different and what else we need to consider.
Sarah Lindley — Art
Here are three assignments for building community:
One assignment was “This Became That”, a virtual Exquisite Corpse project. Each week for the second half of the term, students made a response to images of an artwork created by another member of the class. Images of their responses were sent to another member of the class at the start of the next week to be used as the inspiration for the next response. At the end of the term we had “lines” of images representing the transmogrification of their ideas and forms. All images passed through me, so the makers remained secret until the end. I kept my instruction and critique to an absolute minimal and just allowed things to evolve based on their own abilities, thought process, available materials, and energy level. The assignment put them inside each other’s thought process and helped communicate that we are still all connected.
The second assignment is on display in fine arts right now. Each student constructed the space where they were living/working in spring term in a 3D modeling program. We then turned those files into plastic molds that I cast plaster into, which resulted in solid representations of the empty space in their homes. The collection of these spaces is displayed as one small installation.
The Art Department sent our studio majors two great short colorful books about finding inspiration through community, including We Inspire Me: Cultivate Your Creative Crew to Work, Play, and Make by Andrea Pippins, as a “welcome to senior year gift” for the studio majors. Students will have an assignment that asks them to reflect on the suggestions in the books and develop some community building ideas tailored to the current distancing protocols.
Josh Moon — Instructional Technology Specialist
There are many elements to forming community in an online course so I’m going to focus on one – time. I know one temptation is to utilize lots of synchronous time to form community. The more time together, more community, right? This is one area where the in-person experience does not translate to the online experience. I’ve written a longer piece about this.
Alyce Brady — Computer Science
Three things I plan for building community in my fall courses:
Before spring quarter began, Sally Reed (Psych.) offered the suggestion to create a PowerPoint deck and have each student contribute a slide introducing themselves. I used that idea in the spring, asking students to contribute their intro cards before the first day of classes, and found it helpful for me (thanks, Sally!)
I plan to break my class down into “lab subgroups” of 4-5 people and give each one a channel in the course team site. A big part of Day 1 and Week 1 will be having students get to know the others in their sub-group.
I have added a “Community” channel to my course Teams site.
Years ago, when I was a young(er) faculty member at the College, Professor Gail Griffin of the English department was in that era’s equivalent of my current role. She made a pronouncement (she made so many) in a faculty meeting discussion that has remained with me clearly: “When a student cheats, it doesn’t mean they’re bad, it means they’re desperate.”
In this piece I intend to speak from two distinct motivations — assessment with equity and student honesty in their work on those assessments. These lead, in my view, to the same set of conclusions and recommendations. Designing our courses and assessment methods in ways that intentionally address and respond to students’ now-more-than-ever sense of desperation goes a long way toward addressing academic integrity in students work. Especially important to acknowledge and act upon: the circumstances of the pandemic have disproportionately negative impact on students of color.
My conclusion is that traditional assessment methods — to the degree that they are designed to reward generic skills rather than individual student experiences — dehumanize further the online learning experience, exacerbate existing inequities that have been made worse by the pandemic, and provide every incentive for students to seek ready-made generic responses to represent as their own. My aspiration in my own courses is to include more assessment methods designed to gauge students’ individual learning and progress over time, and to be as valuable for me in adjusting my teaching as they are in helping me determine student performance.
Five Do’s and Five Do Not’s
Let’s start with a new (August 2020) piece by Natasha A. Jankowski from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment: “Assessment During A Crisis:Responding to a Global Pandemic” Based on a lot of survey data from colleges and universities gathered during the spring crisis online term, the author notes “Concerns that existed preCOVID have been amplified, basic student needs are not met, and the rates at which they are not met are nearly double for students of color” and offers a concise list of recommendations for going forward into the uncertain fall term of 2020:
Do not forget that we are in a pandemic. Still. Do not forget that it is also an inequitable pandemic.
Do not cause further harm. Do not support, enable, or endorse policies that perpetuate further inequities or fuel negative perceptions of students.
Do not ask students for their approval of a decision that has already been made. Instead, engage with them in advance to help determine a solution.
Do not require a higher-level of proof of learning in an online class than you would normally require in a face-to-face setting.
Do not forget that this is not the educational experience students wanted or expected.
Do use learning outcomes as a guide and means to design and focus educational offerings.
Do listen to student voices AND respond accordingly.
Do modify assignments and assessments in ways that are flexible, utilize low-bandwidth, and are based in the principles of equitable assessment.
Do be aware of and address systemic inequities.
Do engage in trauma-informed and healing-centered pedagogy and assessment.
Principles of equitable assessment
What are those “principles of equitable assessment” in the list of Do’s above? In a short 2018 article I read a single admonition that provides a guiding principle:
Assessment should help us learn about students—not sort them.
Confronting Inequity / Assessment for Equity, H. Richard Milner IV http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb18/vol75/num05/Assessment-for-Equity.aspx
Milner goes on to provide “five interrelated reminders educators need as we work toward assessment for equity:”
Assessments and “measurement” should be used to gauge student learning, development, and improvement over time.
Assessments should be used by teachers to adjust their practices (how they teach, what they teach, when they teach, and so forth) to respond to and meet the needs of students.
Students should not feel intimated by assessments, but see them as opportunities to get a snapshot—a picture of where they are and what they need to do to improve.
Punitive assessments send the wrong message and can raise anxiety among learners, especially the ones who most need our support.
Perhaps most important, assessment tools should be just as diverse as the students who take them.
Individual assessments that bring individual experiences to the foreground
As I write this piece, I’ve been talking a lot with Alyce Brady, whose own piece on equity-based low-stakes high-engagement grading appears here. As she described her approach and some of her specific assessment practices, it occurred to me that a central idea in her work is that reflections and other metacognition-based activities assess individual students on their individual experiences. Especially in fields like hers (computer science) and mine (math) we often assess individual students on work which is entirely generic — the program runs correctly, the calculus solution used the right steps to get the right answer — in ways that are not only anti-individual but seem almost perfectly designed to incentivise students to seek out these generic solutions online and submit them in place of their own individual work. That’s not to say practice and skill-building isn’t a key component of student learning, but assessing those skills can be problematic if the individual experience of students is left unaddressed.
One *helpful* resource to help us imagine alternative assessment activities
Yeah, I know. As I’m sure yours is, my email inbox is full of uncurated lists of online resources that rarely reward me for clicking through them. Here is a list of one resource that I did find helpful from Rutgers:
The Rutgers resource is seems motivated by the fact that traditional memorization based exams will certainly lead students to make use of ubiquitous online resources during exams. It provides alternatives grounded in richer learning models that make it more likely that students will submit their own original work. As I read this resource, I found myself thinking about how these methods can align with the principles of equity-based assessment as well.
K’s “online backbone” plan for fall courses is designed to provide the flexibility we need to keep community members safe while allowing students to continue to experience the hallmark features of a K education, whatever the public health situation brings. Designing effective courses that meet those goals is the singular challenge of our lives as educators. This year, in keeping with the challenges before us, we are replacing our traditional in-person fall gathering with the aptly named #KTeachDev2020, a mix of faculty-contributed blogs, tutorials, and conversations that start now and will continue to evolve throughout the summer. We invite you to interact with, and contribute to, the #KTeachDev2020 collection of resources.
A 5-minute Video Tour of #KTeachDev2020 resources
The #KTeachDev2020 Homepage
The #KTeachDev2020 homepage can be reached by links at the Teaching Commons Site and the TLC Site, as well as from links at the other #KTeachDev2020 resources. It contains blog entries from a variety of contributors about lessons learned from the online teaching experience in spring and plans for fall.
The Teaching Development Moodle Site
Josh Moon is developing a Moodle site Teaching Development for Online Learning – Summer 2020 that contains lots of resources about teaching, as well as providing a field-tested model for the kinds of things you can do with your own Moodle site.
The Teaching Commons Teams site with Channels for sharing ideas
The most interesting and dynamic part of the #KTeachDev2020 is the discussion it generates among colleagues. We’ve created a space for that at the Teaching Commons Teams site. Members of TLC will monitor the Discussion Channels. We hope you will post your ideas, respond to others, and check back often to share in the collective wisdom of your colleague instructors.
Here I share how I used Instagram as a replacement for slideshows and more traditional Moodle posts, allowing students to engage aesthetically and analytically with course materials in ways that felt personal and accessible.
I’m sure we all have salient memories of March 13, that final day of classes at K when we knew coronavirus was looming, when we were just wrapping up the Winter term, completely unsure of what was to come. We had just begun carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer with us, masks were not yet a thing. Maybe we had a pack of Lysol wipes in our offices. Our students sat close together, sharing bagels and iced coffees. We stood close together in the library elevator. At the end of my morning class, not knowing when they were going to see me again on campus, a couple of students asked if we could give me a hug. They were the last people I hugged outside of my family.
That morning students in my Religion and Masculinity class were chatty and restless as we sat in our library classroom. Rather than discuss the reading for that day on the intimacy of 19th century men’s studio portraits, we spent the class time imagining what an online class at K might look like. The first things my students dreaded was having their only meaningful interaction with course texts be through Moodle posts. My brilliant colleague, Ambre Dromgoole, a PhD Candidate at Yale, had tweeted a few days prior about using Instagram Live in lieu of other lecture-delivery platforms. I loved the idea of using Instagram and floated it by my students. Instantly they agreed that it would be fun and accessible to use social media for classes. I was preparing to teach my Catholics in the Americas class in the Spring. Usually my slideshows at the start of each class are full of Met Gala costumes, skulls, bones and other macabre relics, cathedral interiors, statues, woodcut images of burning convents, festivals, and processions. A course on Catholicism begs for visual richness and interactions with objects, architecture, and art. Instagram is the perfect platform for students to think about the relationship between tradition, practice, texts, objects, and images.
As I told my students, Catholics are EXTREMELY ONLINE, by which I mean many of them use social media, whether that be Instagram or Twitter to share dimensions of their religion, to post images of saints and rosaries, prayers, and increasingly the internet and social media platforms have become a media of presence. Blessings and the presence of Christ can travel through computer screens and Twitter posts. Just before the Spring term began, on March 28, 2020, Pope Francis delivered the Urbi et Orbi [to the city and the world] Blessing to an empty St. Peter’s Square. In the blue glow of night tens of thousands of people all over the world tuned into a livestream. Catholics watched as the Pope adored the Blessed Sacrament, and as he walked out onto the square in the rain holding the gold monstrance with the body of Christ at its center. This was not simply a symbolic gesture, but an efficacious one. From the square, through the cameras, through thousands of screens Catholics were not only blessed, but could receive a plenary indulgence, a remission of temporal punishment for sin, if they tuned in by internet, radio, or television. In short, the internet, social media platforms, and other digital media technologies are central to how Catholics stay in touch with Rome, with each other, and are essential to contemporary devotional culture and practice. So Instagram seemed the perfect way for students to engage with historical and contemporary Catholic culture, and curate their own images to go with their thoughts on the readings and materials each week.
Every student was required to make a new Instagram account that they would use just for class—to minimize the awkwardness of using their personal accounts, and I too made an account that was private and just for class use. On their account they would post weekly in response to the readings, films, or sources for that week. Each week they would post what I called a “Virtual Provocation:”
These posts should include a reflection on something that interests you in the day’s readings and questions for discussion. Your post can be a combination of your own thoughts and quotes, passages, images, memes you have made, media clips etc.
Use these posts to raise provocations—what stood out to you? Can you make connections with other texts, examples, classes, events etc.? Did something in the text jog your memory? Do you take issue with any of the author’s arguments? Why? These should help jump start discussion and you should read and comment on each other’s posts as well. Posts should raise substantive issues rather than noting minor curiosities or posing purely informational questions. These will demonstrate your engagement with the texts and themes.
For this kind of assignment, fewer guidelines helped the students find their own voice and style. K students, creative, curious, independent thinkers that they are, rose to the challenge and I was delighted with how thoughtful their posts were. In response to videos, readings, and primary sources, students would select an image—sometimes this was a family photo, a picture from their time abroad, a painting, a building, a devotional image etc.—and their caption would contain their response to the readings. They knew these would be read by me and others, so it was the perfect place to ask questions, quote the text, and voice their own perspectives on the course readings. Sometimes these were personal, as students who had gone through Communion and Confirmation themselves, or went on pilgrimages, shared how the text complemented, complicated, and illuminated their own religious histories and experiences. Often these were critical, when they were voicing frustration with an author’s argument or critiquing missionaries and their role in colonization, or the Church’s theology of gender and sexuality, or the entanglement of religion and politics. I found these posts were of much higher quality than any Moodle posts had been in past classes, perhaps because of the reflection and thought required in pairing text and image, or the accessibility of the technology and their ease with the platform. For me, reading their posts was as simple as scrolling my feed, something I would do naturally. Due the night before our synchronous discussions, these posts were useful as I prepared discussion questions, and helped me prompt students to share their ideas and stories. The posts helped me create personal connections with students who I had never met in person, allowing me to learn their voice, and their unique perspective on the world. This made what could sometimes be awkward video chats run smoothly and much like an in-person class discussion would. Students would read each other’s posts and be ready not just to talk to me, but with each other about the materials, and they really enjoyed the use of social media for distance learning. Some student comments:
“Instagram was used so well!!! I don’t know if you have been considering this yet, but when you go back to in person you might consider still using it. That was really amazing.”
“The class platform was super enjoyable – connecting over social media to post provocations and other interesting things. That was super different and exciting, not to mention creative on Dr. Maldonado’s part.”
Some samples of student profiles:
Some students made memes, which takes a deep understanding of the material, and I love the remixing of old and new media forms. In the one below, a student thinks about Jesuit’s glorification of martyrdom in New France in their missionary work with the Iroquois. The student even tagged each of their Instagram accounts in the meme.
In the pandemic, sometimes with shoddy WiFi, or devices shared between multiple siblings, it is important for students to be able to access course materials and even engage in course requirements on their phones. If I feel like I have low bandwidth for watching videos and other recordings, students might too. Instagram stories became a perfect way for me to deliver background content and share visual media with students without the need for video streaming or even sharing or downloading attachments. They could casually click through an Instagram story wherever they might be, and at whatever time of the day they find time. About once a week, I used Instagram stories in lieu of PowerPoint to create stories that students could click through to learn about historical background and context, whether that be the origins and development of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, anti-Catholicism in the 19th century, violence between Protestants and Catholics, or why saints are so important. I prioritized choosing a compelling image for each slide. I then typed out a couple of short sentences to go along with the image—slotting lecture notes right into a slide won’t work as each needs to be easy to read and minimal. Attention to color, contrast, font size is important for readability too. Just seeing these images helped build a familiarity and facility with Catholic iconography and material culture, an important part of this course. An example of a cover slide and two informational slides:
Using Instagram helped students not only understand Catholic objects, spaces, and aesthetics (and learn that Catholicism is about much more than the hierarchy and theology), but also learn and display facility in how to discuss them. They were able to think critically about representation and practice, and about the pervasiveness and diversity of Catholicism in their towns, cities, and online worlds. I found it to be an equitable way to share content and have students engage in the course and contribute their own thoughts using only their phones. The flexibility and creativity of this platform and their facility with posting and viewing text and images in this way yielded strong work, critique, and analysis in ways that directly fed into our class discussions. More, this platform pushed me to consider how to deliver information in bite-sized and visually interesting ways, and it helped me connect with my students outside of learning management software. It met me where I was and met them where they were. I imagine these kinds of posts and stories could work well for a variety of disciplines to help students connect in meaningful ways with class materials and develop and share their own written perspectives, questions, and critiques.
After you upload your video to Streams, you need to choose who will be able to access it. You can allow any user with a kzoo.edu account to see it, or you can limit access to individuals or groups of your choosing. Perhaps the most common way to do that is to grant access only to members of a Teams Channel—like for your course!
This 2-minute video demonstrates what you need:
If you want to bypass the video, here’s the step-by-step in pictures
I was fascinated with the earliest poems I read and heard that gave insight into all the secret territories of the human spirit, our relationships with one another. Somehow those glimpses felt comforting, like looking through the lit windows of other people’s homes at dusk, before they closed the curtains. How did other people live their lives? Just a sense of so many other worlds out there, beginning with the next house on my own street, gave me a great energy. How could anyone ever feel lonely?
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Lights in the Window”
When you picture a writer, what comes to mind? Likely some version of a writer toiling away in isolation, an iconic image of a solitary genius. Yet for most of us, writing happens in context and community, in response and reference to others— like the way I felt compelled to bring the above Nye passage into this post for you, reader. I often refer to writing as “this solitary thing we do together.” Even Emily Dickinson, often imagined as a lonely spinster in an attic, circulated her poems among family and friends and wrote copious letters.[1] Louise Rosenblatt (1978) describes texts as being made up of not only the words on the page, but of a mutual interaction between the writer’s words and the reader, with the response of the reader actively co-creating the meaning. This interdependence between writer and reader underpins a writing workshop. I have been thinking a lot about how to design for connection and belonging in a virtual setting.
One of my immediate goals, then, in the emergency spring pivot to online, was to set up a virtual platform that offered a strong sense of being together, or what some in online learning call “co-presence.” And to do that really quickly. Gunawardena & Zittle (1997) found a sense of social presence to be a predictor of student satisfaction. Biocca, Harms, and Gregg (2001) define co-presence as “the degree to which the observer believes he/she is not alone and secluded.” In an online learning context, it’s about interaction and how real people feel on the other side. For our discussion forums and small group workshops, I chose a collaboration hub called Slack. Having previously used Slack in a remote working context, I felt comfortable with how to navigate its features on such short notice. My students reported stress-free adoption and seamless mobile access, and appreciated its intuitive, connected user experience. The platform is just a platform, though; there is still the question of how to build interaction. Here are some reflections from my students that I believe describes a sense of co-presence:
Poetry is a class that I feel like you can’t just slack off for. Being engaged with one another and your own work is really crucial to understanding the content and really engaging with the course as a whole. The way this course was established using Slack helped to create an environment where you were held accountable without being judged. Seeing one another’s comments every single week helped encourage you to read more in depth, read again, write in a different way, and challenge yourself. The opportunity to reply to the poems of my classmates made my own poetry stronger because I could take an objective view some days. I really loved this class
(Intermediate Poetry Workshop)
Even though this class has been under less than normal circumstances since we are online, I feel like this class maintained workshop atmosphere to the best of its abilities. It’s hard to connect with people when you don’t see them every week, but Slack helped a lot with connecting to one another’s poetry and reading discussions. We saw a wide variety of different kinds of poetry and prompts and in working in smaller groups, we also saw how individuals interpret all of them differently.
(Intermediate Poetry Workshop)
In the “before” times, my workshops at K had an entire sensorium grounded in social and physical proximity. Chair legs rattling against carpet. Shuffling and swapping of papers as group members huddled up around annotated drafts. Caramel syrup in someone’s coffee. Black-capped chickadees darting around in the evergreens outside the classroom windows. That buzz of conversation. In some ways, the conditions of pandemic are antagonistic to co-presence. Yet it is possible to design for a feeling of being together in a virtual setting.
Biocca, F., Harms, C., & Gregg, J. “The networked minds measure of social presence: Pilot test of the factor structure and concurrent validity.” Paper presented at the 4th International Workshop on Presence, Philadelphia, PA. May 2001.
Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Gunawardena, C.N., & Zittle, F.J. “Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computer-mediated conferencing environment.” The American Journal of Distance Education, 11(3), 1997. 8-26.
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. 1-2.
Lerman, Liz, and John Borstel. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. Takoma Park, MD: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, 2003. Print.
Menon, Tanya, and Phillips, Katherine W. “Getting Even or Being at Odds? Cohesion in Even- and Odd-Sized Small Groups.” Organization Science, Volume 22, Issue 3, May-June 2011.
Neruda, Pablo, and Stephen Mitchell. Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1997. Print.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Lights in the Window.” Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. 2005.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Print.
[1] If you’re looking for a good movie to stream online at home, try Wild Nights with Emily.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Teams but Were Afraid to Ask!
This video features a meeting in which we discuss how to start or join a meeting in Microsoft Teams, how to participate through features such as raising a hand, muting and unmuting video or audio, or chatting on the side, how to share your screen, and how to record a meeting. We also talk a little bit managing meetings and how the Meet feature integrates with other Teams components.
Air handling is different than temperature/humidity control, but those are related
Different classroom buildings have different needs
Portable air purifier units
1. Dilution is the Solution to Pollution
The key idea is to dilute indoor air, and any infectious material in that air, with fresh air from outdoors. The air handling systems in classroom buildings at K have the capability to do exactly that with large outside air intake devices on each building. In fact, that was the case before Covid19 too. In the past, the mix of recirculated air and fresh outside air was achieved automatically by instruments that detect and maintain carbon dioxide levels in the building at healthy levels while improving energy efficiency by recycling some of the indoor air that has already been heated or cooled.
As we turn our attention to preventing possible spread of Covid19 by particles and aerosols in the indoor air, these systems are being reconfigured to increase the amount of outside air being brought indoors. This, together with the lower building occupancy associated with the College’s distancing and de-densifying plan, increases the effective dilution ventilation per person.
2. The Unintuitive Thing About Windows — Leave Them Closed.
In my house, the easiest way to dilute the inside air with fresh air from outside is to open a window. The situation in classroom buildings is different: The systems that detect and control the amount of fresh outside air in the building are tied directly to the outside air intake location in each building and not to any given room. Opening a window in one room disrupts the fresh air sensing equipment for the whole building, resulting in less fresh outside air being brought into the other rooms in the building.
3. What you feel in the air: Air Handling and Temperature Control are Different Things
The aspect of the building’s indoor environment we are most aware of is the temperature and humidity. The environmental control systems in the classroom buildings at K maintain a comfortable interior environment by two separate processes: air handling and hydronics.
Air handling is what we’ve been talking about in the points above. The hydronic system involves moving air past coils filled with heated or chilled liquid. That heating and chilling happens in the boiler/chiller plant at the bottom of Academy Street, with the hydronic liquid passing through underground pipes to the classroom buildings.
The air handling systems will be configured to bring more outside air into the mix to achieve greater dilution in each building, but of course we know that for most of the academic year in Kalamazoo, that outside air is cold! The amount of fresh outside air that can be included in the air handling mix will need to be balanced with the capacity of each building’s hydronic system to maintain a comfortable and safe temperature.
4. Different Buildings, Different Systems
What about my building? Here are some things to know:
Dow Science building, because of its design for preventing airborne health hazards from chemistry and biology labs, has always included 100% fresh outside air in the air handling mix. There is no recirculation of interior air at all. The extra-high capacity hydronic system designed for that building maintains the indoor environment at comfortable temperature and humidity.
Olds-Upton Hall has an air-handling system which is adequate for its traditional usage, as well as high dilution with greater proportion of fresh outside air discussed here. The hydronic system in OU is undersized for that purpose however. For that reason, it is possible that temperatures in OU will be less comfortable this year. To help maintain interior comfort, portable electrostatic air purifier units are planned for classroom spaces in OU, allowing for fresh air levels to be better balanced with the capacity of the hydronic system while at the same time actively reducing the concentration of any infectious material in the air.
Dewing Hall is a tale of two zones. The air handling unit for the 3rd floor is not configurable to bring higher amounts of fresh outside air into the mix. For that reason, portable electrostatic air purifiers are planned for any classroom space in use on Dewing 3rd floor. The other levels of Dewing hall have a separate air handling system which allows for the greater dilution with outside air we’ve been discussing here.
Light Fine Arts has generally adequate air handling capacity for including greater dilution of outside air. The special purpose uses of many spaces in LFA — for activities that traditionally bring large groups together in close contact while singing, acting, playing wind instruments, etc — bring with it special considerations.
Upjohn Library Commons has generally adequate air handling capacity for including greater dilution of outside air. The need for special climate control in the rare book room brings extra considerations into play.
5. Portable Air Purifier Units
A lot of portable electrostatic air purifier units are on order now for use in classroom spaces in Dewing and OU, with deliveries scheduled to begin in the first few weeks of the term. As with other high-demand items — remember that every other higher education institution is making similar orders — the delivery dates are likely to change. These units are rated to handle large rooms from 1500 to 3000 square feet (1500 square feet is 30×50). We won’t know until they arrive how much sound they generate and the resulting impact on classroom acoustics.
