Maintaining the PACE

The Physics & Astronomy Collaborative-learning Environment (PACE) is both a new teaching area as well as an accompanying approach to teaching. The space has been constructed in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Monash to enable academics to engage learners via a student-centred approach, as opposed to the transmission model utilised in traditional lectures. The new space is designed to encourage academics to blend, flip and try all manner of modern and innovative pedagogies, assess their success, and hone in on sustainable approaches that show demonstrable improvements over traditional university teaching.

PACE has been in the planning stages for some time. Many of the ideas behind PACE having been communicated at previous versions of this conference both informally and via Poster (Hughes 2013a) and an Ideas Exchange (Hughes 2013b), and via a talk during the Physics discipline meeting in 2014. There are also a number of resources on the web (Hughes 2013, Monash 2015a & 2015b).

The new PACE space was completed at the beginning of 2014. In 2015 we have had our first unit making full use of the PACE Studios - a first year astronomy unit, lead by Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway, without any lectures, with all classes running in the new space.
In Semester 1 of 2016 our main physics unit will take a similar approach, lead by Dr Eric Thrane, with all classes running in the Studios.