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The main purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of teacher's position on students' performance in higher education. A new pedagogical approach based on collaborative learning is used due to the design of a smart learning environment (SLE). This workspace uses, respectively, information and communication technologies (ICT) and radio frequency identification (RFID)-based indoor positioning system in order to examine students' perceptions and the involvement of groups into this smart classroom. The merge of interactive multimedia system, ubiquitous computing and several handheld devices should lead to a successful active learning process. Firstly, we provide a detailed description of the proposed collaborative environment using mainly new technologies and indoor location system serving as a platform for evaluating attention. The research provides an obvious consensus on the teacher's role in assessing classroom attention. We discuss our preliminary results on how teacher's position influences essentially students' participation. Our first experiments show that the integration of novel technologies in the area of higher education is extremely promoting the traditional way of teaching. The smart classroom model has been recommended to support this evolution. As a result, the found results indicate that the teacher's position increases the learner's motivation, engagement and effective learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]