Classroom Needs Analysis Focus Group Questions

This section is written for discussion facilitators. The questions are tailored to instructors who teach face-to-face courses, not in computer labs, other kinds of laboratories, clinical settings, or solely online courses.

1. What kinds of courses do you teach (introductory surveys, seminars, upper division topical courses, or graduate-level)? How many students are typically in your classes?
2. What kinds of activities do your students experience in a typical class meeting? [Discussion facilitators record the different types of activities mentioned. Those listed activities will be used in the questions below.]

Note: Show the slideshow below with exemplars of existing and aspirational classrooms at IUPUI to show focus group participants the range of features that can be available in classrooms.

Introduce this activity by saying to participants: We are going to show you photographs of various classrooms and classroom attributes. Please consider how well the different attributes would work for your teaching approach.

^{Click here to download a PDF version of the slideshow above.}

Classroom features to show:

1. 1. Different kinds of seating – tablet-arm chairs, Steelcase “bumper car”, other types of chairs on casters or without casters
   2. Tables – multi-person rectangular tables, individual tables that may be combined to form tables for groups of various sizes, tables with and without casters
   3. Display technologies – individual tablet white boards, white boards on casters, wall-mounted glass or whiteboards, digitally based affordances that allow sharing of student work with groups and class (e.g., Solstice, Crestron), touch screens, others
   4. Web conferencing collaborative affordances (e.g., eagle eye)
   5. Room configurations – amphitheater style with tablet arm chairs, law- or business-style amphitheater with long tables, amphitheater style with affordances for collaboration (e.g., Hine Hall 118), scale-up rooms with round tables, rooms with pod arrangements of tables that seat 6 to 8 and feature collaborative digital display affordances (e.g., LE 104), seminar style with conference table,
   6. Various seating capacities of classrooms exhibiting some or all of the characteristics described above
   7. Other

3. Those of you who [insert instruction approach mentioned, e.g., lecturing], what classroom features would help facilitate that type of approach? [Repeat, as needed, to address all of the teaching activities mentioned in question 2)
4. What classroom features would not work well for the teaching approach(es) you use in the classroom?
5. How important is proximity of the classroom to your office or other locations that you inhabit on or off campus? (e.g., being close in proximity to your campus office or easy to get to from off-campus locations).
6. What does convenience mean to you in terms of classroom location? (e.g., in what building is your office? and what classroom buildings meet your criteria for convenience?)
7. What other classroom features are important to you?