New NSC building packed with high-tech tools

By Charlotte Hsu

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In its infancy, Nevada State College, operating in a strip mall and vitamin warehouse, might have seemed like the stepchild of Nevada’s higher education system.

This week, though, the 6-year-old college rang in the school year with a 42,000-square-foot, $23.4 million building in Henderson that might earn it the envy of its older siblings.

Sure, it has a fresh coat of paint and a view of the mountains, but it also is packed with technology that could change the way professors teach.

Each of 10 classrooms and labs is outfitted with a Sympodium, which allows instructors to use a hand-held pen to write, ink-free, on a computer screen and display their notes on a larger screen for students.

Each room also comes with a document camera, a new-age overhead projector. The device enables professors to place any paper or object on a small platform and project the image, enlarged, onto a screen.

Another cause for excitement is the i-clicker, a system that lets teachers poll students on multiple choice questions. Students reply by punching in responses on small remote controls they can keep at their desks.

It’s akin to the system that lets contestants on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” canvass the audience for answers.

Instead of posing questions and calling on individuals to respond, “This gives me a way of easily and quickly asking a question of everyone in the class all at once,” math professor Jason Lee said.

“I can get a little bit of a better sense of the class as a whole,” he added.

Lots of correct responses would indicate that most students are ready to move on to a new topic. Mistakes would signal that professors should consider spending more time on the material at hand.

And the clickers let students who are shy participate in class without having to speak publicly.

Together, the i-clicker, Sympodiums and document cameras, along with technologies including DVD/VCR and audio systems, cost Nevada State College $212,770.

•••

High-tech gadgets aside, students are giddy about all the old-fashioned features of a college that the new building offers — places for students to lounge and study with their peers, billboards where departments can tout their news and events.

All these will help the young college foster a sense of community. Marijke Blokker, a junior studying English, thinks the new digs will actually encourage students to work harder in school.

“It motivates students because they feel like they’re actually at a college,” she said.

“It makes you feel like the college is actually proud of its student body.”

Though the new facility is called the Liberal Arts and Sciences building, students from the college’s nursing and education programs are taking classes there.

Classes also continue in the vitamin warehouse, and the college’s top administrators, including the president and provost, are still working in that downtown strip mall.

The school is planning its second new building, which would house the nursing program and cost an estimated $40 million.

•••

The College of Southern Nevada has cut top-level administrators, reducing its number of vice presidents from six to four.

In the 2007-08 academic year, the college lost its executive vice president of planning and development and its vice president of administrative operations.

President Michael Richards has distributed those individuals’ duties to other administrators.

“One reason was for efficiency’s sake,” CSN spokeswoman K.C. Brekken said. “At the time we were facing a huge budget crisis, and other areas absorbed those positions’ duties. And they are working a lot harder now and a lot longer hours. Everybody’s doing paperwork at six or seven at night. People are going home to their families and having dinner and going to their offices and working.”

Note: The headline of this story was changed to correct an error.