Making a Smart Campus in Saudi Arabia

A brief report by Eltayeb Salih Abuelyaman at Prince Sultan University:

• What makes a teacher smart?
• What makes a classroom smart?
• Since colleges, departments, and individual courses have diverse missions, goals, and objectives, should smart classrooms be clones of each other?
• Should we make all classrooms on a campus smart?
• Are teachers ready to adapt to a new, smart environment?
• How can we help teachers take advantage of a smart environment?

Three of these questions are easily answered with a "No." We should not make all classrooms technologically enhanced clones of each other, and, no, many teachers are not ready to take full advantage of such environments. So, how does a university get to be smart? By finding answers to the other three questions—recruiting and developing smart teachers, obtaining and effectively deploying smart technology, and sustaining faculty efforts with the aid of smart pedagogical centers.