Post-Pandemic Campus

It seems realistic to anticipate the safe return of campus life sometime in the 21-22 academic year, but the post-pandemic campus will not be the way things were in March 2020.  What will the post-pandemic campus need to become?  How will it differ from the thousand-year tradition of place-based higher education?

Colleges and universities have been changed by the pandemic.  They are now always digital and occasionally physical.  Teaching, studying and working remotely will continue to be available and an option preferred by many.  Time on campus will continue to be both more transient and more valuable. Continue reading

Campus:  Reboot and Redesign

RebootImagine reoccupying a physical campus.  It will be like trying to reboot the command module of Apollo 13, and you are Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinise in the movie).  You are in the command module simulator on the ground.  You have to decide what to turn on and in what sequence, without crashing the computer.

Everywhere teams of “Ken Mattinglys” are working on plans to reboot their campuses.  Many have come to realize the campuses they have may not be the ones they need.  All original design assumptions have been changed.  They are now working with a new design program suited for the both/and world of physical and digital presence.  This post is written for these teams.

Mattingly had a manual.  He knew the amps drawn by each system and he was working on a single spacecraft.  He knew how many astronauts he had to consider.  You don’t have a manual.  You don’t know how large the crew will be nor a time for splashdown.  Academic administrators are considering a wide range of scenarios and postponing decisions as long as possible.  Meanwhile, the expected number of on campus undergraduates is eroding.  The uncertainties of timing and target make your challenge almost impossible.

Scenarios

The work of Edward J. Maloney and Joshua Kim lays out 15 scenarios focused on teaching and learning.  UC Davis and others have published draft plans for ramping up on-campus research. Purdue, Brown and many others are preparing to return to normal, albeit with enhanced health monitoring and infectious disease response programs.  Even the most optimistic scenarios of “Back to Normal-Fall 2020” assume smaller incoming classes and fewer existing students returning.  The only exceptions are those already in online programs.  Most of the planning concepts start with assumptions that there will be fewer students on campus and more online programing than pre-pandemic levels.

An insightful whitepaper by Eliot Felix and his colleagues at Brightspot is a good starting point for everyone thinking about the post-COVID peak campus.  There are links to relevant articles by other higher education experts and data on trends.  Accelerating trends include the convergence of online and on-campus education.  Decelerating trends include travel, particularly international.  The piece concludes with recommendations including assessing how facilities are used and rethinking operations and staffing.

Reboot

What do you turn on first?  What do you leave turned off?  These questions are valid if the start date is August 2020 or January 2021.  Think of this as a much needed change in trajectory, an opportunity to redesign campuses for the realities of 21st century, rather than the traditions of the 20th century.

I made 6 recommendations for the future of campuses in 2013, as I assessed the logical consequences of increased use of online learning.

  • Build no net additional square feet
  • Upgrade the best; get rid of the rest
  • Manage space and time; re-think capacity
  • Right-size the whole
  • Take sustainable action
  • Make campus matter

All are still valid.  Managing space and time and rethinking capacity has been important for a long time.  Now it is urgent.  It is the first step for the teams of “Ken Mattinglys.”

Manage space and time; re-think capacity

The need for social distancing requires a different set of metrics and different models of space management.  The economics of the institution may be based on maximizing the number of on-campus students.  Over at least the next academic year, the potential capacity of campus will be reduced.  Residence hall potential capacity will be more than 50% less than pre-pandemic levels.  Classroom and lab capacity will be lower still.

If enrollments are low enough, space will not be a constraint.  If enrollments are high enough the changed metrics will create constraints.  The answer lies in adding time to the equation.  Expanding the classroom hours per week will increase potential capacity.  Hybrid courses will offer the most significant opportunities.  They combine online and on-campus synchronous sessions with asynchronous content.  Any version will challenge pre-pandemic norms and ingrained management practices.

Make campus matter

With so much of higher education available in digital and largely asynchronous forms, the justification for a campus must derive from something more than “we have always done it this way.” As the pandemic spread, instructors and administrators were forced to consider the pedagogical requirement of face-to-face classes.  Many scrambled for digital alternatives, previously dismissed as substandard.

Some faculty members have found the advantages of teaching parts of their courses online.  Other faculty members will not return to face-to-face teaching until vaccine protection is available.  All have learned to teach with more intention.  Many of their courses will not return to campus this academic year, and none will return unchanged.

Even at the most traditional institutions “on-campus time per degree” was already declining.  The pandemic has dramatically accelerated this trend.  This change in convention makes the support of increasingly limited face-to-face time a strategic value, rather than an assumed byproduct of traditional campus life.

Sharing time and place

There must be something significantly better about “live performance” and it needs to be more than “sense of place.” I believe it is a function of sharing time and place.  Whether in the form of agenda driven or serendipitous conversation, “live” interactions among students and instructors have a bandwidth that exceeds current digital alternatives. This is a luxury, no longer to be taken for granted. To justify the expense of a campus, this luxury must be exploited to improve the value of the outcome, not simply to increase the price of admission.

The specifics of rethinking the campus will be unique for every institution, and none of it will be easy.  Over time some campuses may see demand return for its residential college experience. For many others, the prospects are not rosy. Regardless of the setting, after all the layers of tradition and place are stripped away there is one irreducible condition – the campus is where students and scholars share time and place when ideas are at stake. Without this condition, the institutions would not have existed in the first place. Without this condition, there is no need for the physical campus.

I began this post in late March as the magnitude of the threat to place-based higher education began to emerge.  Since then I have had conversations with more than two dozen higher education colleagues across the country.  Each added to my understanding of the challenges.  I am grateful to all.

Campus Futures – Two Insightful Voices

Academia Next scans beyond the horizon to lay out possible futures for higher education.  Campus of the Future recognizes the evolving physical state of campuses. Both books will be available in early 2020.  Filled with insights into the future of campuses, each is the result of years of study.

Academia Next by Bryan Alexander considers the morphing of higher education with particular attention to technology and the near-term consequences of demographic and economic trends.  Before making the daring move of imagining higher education beyond 2035, he lays out seven scenarios for the near-term.

Scenarios

Alexander draws these scenarios from current trends and his work with scores of colleges and universities.  All these institutions are dealing with the consequences of the last 20 years of transformation in higher education.  All are facing existential crises for the next 20 years and beyond.  Alexander offers no glib answers.  As he sees it, “much of American higher education now faces a stark choice:  commit to experimental adaptation and institutional transformation often at serious human and financial costs, or a painful decline into an unwelcoming century.”

“Peak Higher Education” is baked in current demographic and economic trends, plausible and not particularly hopeful, with American higher education in decline.  More hopeful trajectories are found in “Health Care Nation,” “Open Education Triumphant” and “Renaissance”.  These three rely on a public consensus that higher education is a public value rather than a private good.  “Retro Campus” posits institutions that intentionally reject technology in order to find better ways of teaching and learning.

As a former university architect, I am most intrigued by “Siri, Tutor Me” and “Augmented Campus.”  The first imagines the benefits of artificial intelligence combined with advances in learning analytics.  In this scenario traditional face to face instruction would be valued to the extent that it “either differs from software or reproduces the “tutorware’s best features.”    Many will find this a scary prospect, but continued improvements in tutoring software and learning analytics are on the way.  Many students may find them most attractive, particularly when compared to current alternatives.

From my study of the digital transformation of higher education and what it means for traditional campuses, I find Alexander’s “Augmented Campus” most compelling.  In this scenario, institutions dive more deeply into digital means and methods.  The distinction between on-campus and off-campus, classroom instruction and on-line learning are blurred to a vanishing point.  At the same time, the physical matter of campuses must be adapted to this new reality.  In the Netherlands, Alexandra den Heijer has found just the right metaphor to help understand the augmented campuses that are already taking shape.

Campus of the Future

Campus of the Future by Alexandra den Heijer has an exquisite sub-title:  managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas. In those few words, she has captured the physical consequences of higher education’s existence in the 21st century. She comes at this from the vantage point of the Delft University of Technology.  TUDelft has become a global institution with more than 2.5 million students world-wide, including 25,000 attending on-campus.  It is well on a path of experimental adaptation and institutional transformation.

Her recent inaugural address (here) as Professor of Architecture and the Built Environment, den Heijer summarizes her theory and practice of shaping the future of her institution and others in Europe.  Campus of the Future frames the existence of the institution in three states of matter:  solid, liquid and gas:  campus (exclusive and territorial), network(interactive and shared), and virtual (place independent and personal).  All three states are part of the planning and design problem facing TUDelft and other 21st century universities.

This is the seventh book in a series addressing the issues of the 21st century campus.  A single data point shows the power of this work.  In the last 25 years, the traditional student body of TUDelft has increased by 113% while the net building area has increased by only 2.5%.  This is an astonishing result accomplished by 1) modernizing heritage buildings, 2) demolishing obsolete structures, 3) adding net new space sparingly, and 4) efficient management of space and time of use.

These strategies are grounded in the belief that better is better, not bigger is better.  American campus planners and facility managers have much to learn from the work of der Heijer and her team.  Among other things, they have developed Smart Tools utilizing a wide range of data-driven efficiency metrics for the management of space and time. These tools have informed the creation of 21st century-appropriate student and faculty centered environments.  At the same time the carbon footprint of the institution has been reduced.

Voices worth hearing

Both Academia Next and Campus of the Future will inspire fresh ways of thinking about the future of higher education; at once familiar and strange, different than we might have imagined.

The approaches and perspectives of Alexander and den Heijer could not be more different, geographically or professionally.  One is based in the wonkiness of futurism and the other is grounded in the stone and steel of place.  They both understand the forces changing higher education and point to the campuses that will result.  Their voices are worth hearing.

Online Education Impacts Campuses – 2017

Equivalent of 500,000 undergrads are only online

Is traditional undergraduate campus building space being made less necessary by online education? Yes.

The growth of online education is depressing the need for the brick and mortar of campuses just like online sales are reducing the need for retail space. In fall 2015 the scale of the undergraduate impact was      12 Arizona States or          52 Harvards.

 

So far more than 23 million square feet of traditional campus space has been obviated by online education. This space is existing and unbuilt.

  • Existing – excess space that is no longer needed; and
  • Unbuilt – space that need not be built.

Continue reading

University Architect – Builder / Steward / Shaper

The roles and responsibilities of a university architect ebb and flow with changes in administration and each particular project. When fast and cheap are valued, the role is to build short-term solutions. If investment in the future is intended a balance of stewardship and creativity is required.

Fluid Environments – Expectations vary for each campus and project. They swing through a wide range, project to project and campus to campus. This dynamic can make a university architect feel the need to be a like a chameleon, shifting from one context to another. In one setting the responsibilities are direct implementation according to established rules. In another, extensive consultation and consideration of long-term consequences are expected. Continue reading

Jeanne Narum – Academic Change Agent

Jeanne NarumJeanne Narum has changed conversations about pedagogy and place, teaching and architecture. Beginning with Project Kaleidoscope and now Learning Spaces Collaboratory she has fostered transformative and ongoing conversations improving pedagogy and the educational function of labs and classrooms. This goes far beyond the glitzy marketing photos and glib sales brochures. Her work has engaged a generation of academic leaders, teachers and architects in design thinking that makes campus matter.

Learning Spaces Collaboratory Webinars – Her current series of webinars is worth a serious look. They are organized for campus stakeholders around lessons learned throughout the country:

  • Investing in active learning classrooms
  • Developing a “space matters” culture
  • Dissolving boundaries between communities
  • Transforming through renovation and connections

The webinars build on a series of 2016 Roundtables on the Future of Planning Learning Spaces.

Year in, year out, Jeanne has focused on the needs of students and their teachers, all the while pushing planning and design professionals out of their comfort zones. This has been hard work, overcoming institutional inertia, promoting a design-thinking approach to pedagogy and challenging institutional and architectural paradigms. The results have been a generation of creativity in learning environments and encouragement for the kind of active learning that benefits both faculty and students. Without these efforts, the learning environments on the country’s campuses would be poorer – less supportive and less effective.

Check out the series of webinars. They are worth your most precious resource, time.

Here is a video from a recent informal conversation with Jeanne. She talks about the importance of cultural, pedagogical and spatial change, the support of the National Science Foundation and the histories of collaboration at the heart of Project Kaleidoscope and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory. In this informal conversation you can see why she has been such a successful agent of academic change.

Online Impact on Campus

ImpactIs it possible that online courses will have no impact on the future of the campus?

Let’s look at the data. More than 25% of college students are taking at least one course online. Paring that down to traditional 4-year undergraduates, the equivalent of more than 400,000 full-time students are not in the classroom. This is the equivalent of 8 Arizona State Universities or 40 Harvards. Continue reading

Classrooms and the 21st Century Campus

Haggans in PDU 130226Classrooms for active learning are strategic assets for the 21st century campus.

Even in the digital transformation of higher education there are three-dimensional classrooms – but not the usual types. Active learning spaces will be a competitive advantage since they support better educational outcomes than traditional methods. Realizing this potential will require a disruptive campus-wide approach to the design and management of classrooms.

In the emerging campus, lecture halls are used less and less used. At the same time there is increasing demand for active learning spaces – those places that allow students to interact with each other and their teachers. Continue reading

University of Uber / Airbnb

GT.chaos.1.baseWhat are the Uber or Airbnb equivalents of the university? These are the questions Tom Fisher thinks campus planners should be asking.

We are at the trailing edge of six decades of campus facilities expansion. The resulting mix of assets can be a rich foundation on which to rebuild and right-size sustainable institutions, or part of an unsustainable burden that helps to sink the rest.

In a recent interview, Fisher argued for rethinking many of the assumptions of the physical campus.

The campuses we have inherited are way too big. I know that seems odd, because when you are on a campus everyone is crying for more space, but we have a lot of highly specialized space that goes under-utilized…the faculty office being one of the more notable ones. Increasingly faculty are carrying their office in their laptop and cell phone. So this idea of having a room set aside for yourself is really antiquated. Classrooms are changing. They will still be used, but the whole campus is a teaching environment. The whole city and region is a learning environment.

The Challenge for SCUP and Campus Planners

Continue reading

Campus Shaping Forces – Dan Kenney

Dan Kenney Headshot.2Evolving cultural forces shape campuses generation by generation. In a recent conversation Dan Kenney, co-author of Mission and Place and I discussed these forces.

Founding campus visions may have defined an initial ideal core, but these institutions are not static. Demographic surges of post WWII, baby boomers, and their echoes have changed the functional scale of institutions. Suburbanization and the need for ubiquitous parking have pushed campus boundaries. Big science, big sport and their massive buildings have morphed the character and experience of campuses.

Dan has worked in this swirl of forces on more than sixty campuses. He believes in the continuing value of campuses and sees new opportunities in increasing environmental resilience and recognizing technological adaptation.

This conversation and those with other thought leaders can be found at the campusmatter.net YouTube channel.