Background

Most of students and teachers in formal education institution use physical classroom to facilitate a direct interaction-academic activities. As student body grow, the number of required physical classroom facility scales up. While physical classroom-direct interaction is maybe the most popular and comfort way of doing academic activities, providing proper physical classroom facility is expensive. For mature, established, and well financially supported higher education institution, such as popular university or technology institute, keeping up with the need of physical classroom facility may not be a problem. Yet small growing not-so popular higher education institution will usually hit a wall called ‘difficulty of finding the funding’. These may include, but not limited to private education institution or probably most of vocational education institutions in my country.

Currently I’m teaching in not-so popular vocational part of a private university. I also responsible for managing and supervising a laboratory. This laboratory also serves as common physical classroom. Not so recent the higher management decided that lecturers should increase the quality of the student’s final project. In addition lecturer’s scientific research publication number should also be increased. The big idea is to synchronize the student’s final project topic with the lecturer’s research topic.

Problem

One of the difficulties of realizing this great idea is that lecturer’s research often requires better supports in form of funding and research tools. These often include special purpose research laboratory with proper facilities. In our case there is no more available common physical classroom or other proper empty space to be converted into research laboratories. Building more physical rooms for research labs doesn’t seem to be financially feasible right now. Therefor we must come up with other solution or probably solutions to provide more research laboratories.

Objective

The objective of this brief and not so well executed research is to find a method to conduct a proper academic activities that requires less number of physical classroom activities. Hence we can free up some physical classrooms and convert them into research laboratories.

Method

I’m not currently well informed and educated about this research topic. Basically I’m going to answer these questions below as a starter.

• What is/are the objective(s) of a vocational higher education institution?

1. rescent research about vocational higher education institution goal
2. governing law/constitution about vocational higher education institution goal
3. vocational higher education institution’s vision and mission

• what are the most suitable teaching and learning styles for achieving the objective(s)?

1. blended learning
2. case based learning
3. any other learning methods

• how does classroom help achieving the objective(s)?
• are there any alternatives or substitution for classroom if there is a lack in available classroom ?