Category Archives: Classrooms

Campus – Adapting

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The first 21st-century pandemic, digital transformation and climate change are altering assumptions that have shaped physical campuses for hundreds of years.

Campuses are palimpsests, places on the earth reshaped layer upon layer, always in the process of becoming a different place.  Adapting a physical campus is a slow, incremental process. Pieces of earlier layers are retained as the whole is modified to meet changing requirements and environmental conditions.

The most visible adaptations accommodate growth in enrollment, research and new academic programs.  Other adaptations are systemic and virtually invisible.  Early steps in digital transformation and hybrid pedagogies were visible in bits of hardware popping up here and there.  Energy conservation was rarely visible while movement to zero-out carbon has only recently begun to change the physical appearance of campuses with living buildings.

State of campuses – Since early 2022, I have talked with scores of former colleagues and planning professionals about the physical state of campuses.  My sense of a changing campus came into focus from these conversations.

Everyone was emerging from constant pandemic threat.  The masks and plexiglass were disappearing, but no one was returning to a pre-March 2020 world.  As disruptions became long-lasting, the expectations of students, faculty, and staff for their campuses and their buildings were shifting.

Some building projects continued as if nothing had changed.  Other projects were paused to allow adaptation to hybrid pedagogies, remote officing, and more intermittent campus use patterns.  Nearly all my colleagues recognized the changing patterns of faculty, staff and students.  None were certain of the downstream consequences.  At the same time, they shared a growing awareness that the extremes of flooding and drought, air quality and heat of a changing climate were just beginning.

I share my colleagues’ uncertainty about how to respond to these converging forces, but we can begin to see a path in adaptation of existing and future facilities projects, building performance requirements, campus infrastructure, and land use.  Here is my take on these adaptations.

At the scale of the campus – Existing and future buildings are being redesigned to support hybrid pedagogies.  Underutilized classroom and office space is being reallocated for students and faculty, for those occasions when they find value in being on campus.  Building envelopes and systems are being redesigned to account for increasing temperature extremes and reduced air quality.  Offices for many administrative functions were moved off-campus years ago, and now are moving to hybrid models and home offices.

Climate action plans are reducing the carbon footprints of campuses. Land use impacts are ranging from divesting unneeded real estate to consideration of migration to higher ground.  Campus infrastructure is being modified to be more resilient to the consequences of drought and flood, heat and wind, and power and communication disruptions.

All these adaptations are happening incrementally, none quickly.  For example, while a classroom renovation project might take less than a year, major building projects usually take 5 to 7 years from inception to occupancy.  Infrastructure replacement and adaption projects can extend for a decade or more.

Beyond new construction, the physical changes to the parts and systems of the campus can go largely unnoticed.  The confluence of climate change, digital transformation and post-pandemic patterns may increase visibility as infrastructure and adaptation projects evolve.

Adaptations are underway in classrooms, study space and libraries, and faculty and administrative offices.  Many campuses are moving to carbon neutrality and resilience.

  • Even in the digitally hybridized future of higher education, there will be classrooms. They will be used by choice and when it makes a difference. 
  • In the future of higher education, there will be libraries and places for people to meet to share ideas, technology and visual forms of communication.
  • Patterns of campus use by students, teachers and staff have been ruptured. Physical presence has become a choice rather than a requirement.
  • Colleges and universities have an obligation to honor their mission and commitment to the future by urgently respond to climate change and becoming more resilient.

In the long history of campuses, adaptation to changes in design requirements and expectations has been constant and gradual.  As we approach the middle of the 21st century acceleration of both digital transformation and climate change is leading to different campuses. The physical campuses that continue to thrive will have reduced their carbon footprint to zero, adapted to changing climate and the hybridization of the institution.

Until recently the physical campus was the same as the institution.  They were the same organism, as shell and snail.  The campus was a direct reflection of the institution’s mission and scale.  The institution required physical places for all its students, faculty and staff.  These assumptions began to dim in relevance in the last decade of the 20th century, but the change was barely noticed.  Building programs were still tied to the rules of thumb and patterns of the past.

The disconnect between traditional building programs and the physical needs of the digitally transformed institution were laid bare in 2020.  The pandemic disrupted well understood patterns of use which were the reasons for campuses in the first place.  This disruption is changing building programs, the use of existing facilities and the campus itself as an expression of the institution.  The snail has escaped its shell.

The specifics of adapting the campus will be unique for every institution, and none of it will be easy.  There may be some with no climate threats and a willingness to ignore their carbon footprint.  These campuses may seem unchanged.  The band will play on, perhaps for a long time. For all the rest, campuses will be rebuilt to be carbon-zero and more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Campuses prepared for the middle of the 21st century will not be collections of historical artifacts relying on prior technologies plus new artifacts with new technologies.  These campuses and their existing buildings will be adapted to meet the needs of a community of increasingly transient students and scholars in a changing climate.

Campus planners are beginning to realize they are planning campuses for a planet that is measurably different. This adaptation will be an existential challenge for generations of students, educators, facilities professionals, administrators and boards.

It will be like rebuilding ships while at sea.

Post-Pandemic Campus

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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 →

Changing Learning: Changing Campus

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The academy is changed one course, one class, one instructor at a time.

Don’t get me wrong. Powerful economic, technological and demographic forces are washing over higher education.  Add to these concerns about value and effectiveness. Institutions plot transformational initiatives, while alternative credential providers chip away at the structural underpinnings of colleges and universities.  These are perilous times.

Beneath these trends and headlines, change is happening.  The change agent is often an instructor, either a veteran who experiments with more effective teaching methods or the newly minted instructor who has never done it the old way.  The learning spaces they share with their students need changing too.  What follows is why they must change and how to accelerate the transformation. Continue reading →

Dissolving Campus Edge

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Campuses traditionally had physical edges.  Boundaries marked by walls, gates and signs defined ownership and identity.  While these markers remain, many institutions have made their boundaries less distinct. Students and faculty move seamlessly back and forth from physical to digital, from the campus to its digital doppelgänger.

Projects across the country point to hybridization – a morphing of building types and fluid patterns of use.  These are not just nearby storefront classrooms or branch campuses; nor are they whole new campus projects 10 time zones away. These are different.  Retail enterprises dealt with this phenomenon as their brick and mortar stores encountered Amazon and its ilk.  The buzzword of choice was phygital.

Innovative programmer/planner of campus environments, Elliot Felix has used the term phygital to describe his firm’s academic library projects.  The Hunt Library at North Carolina State is an early example.  The library and its resources are first digital and then physical, reversing the conventional understanding.  Libraries organized around this inversion, are better suited to meet the needs of faculty members and students living in the flow of digital/physical life and learning. Continue reading →

Remaking the OR’s of Higher Ed: LSC and FLEXspace

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Learning spaces are strategic assets of higher education, just as operating rooms are for
healthcare. These rooms support events that are synchronous and personal; where teaching and learning is face to face; individually and in small groups.  These are the spaces where memory is tethered to place.  Campus does matter when this happens.  Otherwise why be there?  Why not be online?

The Learning Spaces Collaboratory and FLEXspace both do heavy lifting in the difficult work of improving learning spaces.  These two organizations are helping to make change room-by-room, building-by-building, campus-by-campus.

Most existing classrooms are pedagogies in steel and concrete, formed in the pre-digital age of tablet-arm chairs.  Some have been clumsily re-fitted with splashy HD screens, but few are designed for the physical/digital, both/and world of active learning and flipped classes.

The Collaboratory focuses on tools and participatory processes for campuses to create effective learning environments.  LSC is hosting its first virtual roundtable on November 3, 2018. Faculty and designers from across the country will share their experience in interactive sessions with folks just beginning the process.

While LSC works in the planning and design phases, FLEXspace documents learning spaces, makerspaces, libraries and the places in between.  They have just added mobile-friendly diagnostic tools for existing spaces.  An accessible inventory of innovative spaces includes thousands of examples in more than 50 countries.  You can search by a host of variables to find comparable settings and comparable projects.  Here is a link to the leaders of FLEXspace on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum.

LSC has been a consistent catalyst for all to think of learning spaces as strategic assets rather than capital costs to be managed.  Jeanne Narum and her team have empowered teachers and administrators to act as if effective learning spaces are essential to the core mission, rather than the latest fad in edu.talk

Improving learning spaces, the operating rooms of higher education, will be part of the strategic vision of campuses that survive and thrive in a competitive digital world.  FLEXspace and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory have seen it this way for a long time.

Online Shift – Everywhere and Nowhere

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Everywhere and NowhereAnother academic year begins and higher education continues its shift to online and digital placelessness.  How much of a shift?  Big and growing – in 2016 the undergraduate shift was as big as 16 Ohio State Universities.

That’s about 750,000 full-time undergraduate students.  These students and their teachers were everywhere and nowhere. They were enrolled at the country’s public and private not-for-profit 4-year colleges and universities.  This is not counting graduate students or those enrolled in for-profits.

Online credit hours – Bricks and mortar

Considered in credit hours: 750,000 undergraduate students “consume” as many credit hours as produced by the combined total of 4 large state university systems:  University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina, State University of New York and California State Colleges and Universities.  Translated into bricks and mortar, its about 45 million square feet of classrooms, offices and student life and study space.

The physical results of online education are:  1) underused buildings – existing space that is no longer needed; or 2) spaces that need not be built as online enrollments grow, even if on-campus enrollment remains steady.  The construction cost of this much building space is about $14 billion, and keeping the lights on would cost more than $1 billion every year.

Why does this matter?

Campuses – the physical footprints – are in a state of flux.  Once they could be designed for rigidly scheduled place-based classes.  Now they need to support an episodic experience that is only occasionally place-specific.  Twenty-first century students and faculty are everywhere and nowhere.

These physical changes are seen through a thicket of business and political contexts that are changing as significantly as technology.  Just as no specific storm can be attributed to climate change, no campus closure can be attributed to digital transformation. The influence of the shifting context can be seen in changes in the public funding, market, demographics and technology of higher education.  The effects ripple out through the existing system of place-based institutions creating both favorable and unfavorable local conditions.

Campuses are in a transformation as significant as the response to the influx of baby boomers.  About 50 years ago building more was the only right answer to burgeoning enrollments.  Now as campuses become less central to the lives of students and their faculty, building more won’t solve many problems and may well create unsustainable results.

The digital transformation of pedagogy, libraries and student experience requires different physical spaces differently arrayed.  The shift to online credit hours changes the relationships among students and faculty and collective expectations for physical space. This transformation requires understanding the campus as a setting for episodic experience rather than activities in lock-step time blocks.  This transformation requires replacing obsolete buildings and modifying the rest for the hyper-connected flow of information, students and faculty.   Adding net new square footage should be a last resort.

Campuses in Transition – 10 years on

When I began writing about the physical effects of digital transformation about 10 years ago, it was more of a question.  If classes are moving online, doesn’t that change the campus?  There were no hard data, just divergent opinions about the future.   The first real evidence emerged in changing pedagogies and redesigned libraries as brave/visionary academics began to realize the potential of early digital products.

At the same time start-ups and other non-traditional providers were developing new forms of instruction and credentials.  Disruption became a buzzword in higher education thought and MOOC’s were in their infancy.  Arizona State and Southern New Hampshire and many others took their own paths to blending campus and online offerings.  All of this expanded the market for higher education, while limiting the market for more traditional providers.

The emerging picture is becoming clear: both/and rather than either/or.  Institutions are becoming both physical and digital. Traditional campuses continue to be key elements in the mix.  Their physicality authenticates and provides visual validation of the degree offered. Campuses are being modified to make them places where it is worth being physically present.  At the same time, traditional campuses are becoming increasingly optional as digital formats mature.  Two simultaneous strands, one physical and one digital, speak to the both/and nature of the emerging campus.

Interwoven strands:  Physical and Digital

The coexistent strands of physical change and digital innovation are being woven together in higher education to create new learning environments.  The Learning Spaces Collaboratory with the visionary leadership of Jeanne Narum continues decades of advocacy and organizing to improve on-campus learning spaces.  The movement’s efforts initially focused on traditional STEM disciplines and student-centered undergraduate research.  More recently the focus has broadened to include spaces designed to support active learning methods, still student-centered involving application of learning rather than traditional lectures.

The transformation of learning environments is grounded in the work of pedagogical pioneers including Bob Biechner and his Scale-Up models.  Learning environments designed for these pedagogies improve student outcomes and support group projects, rather than lectures.  These types of spaces also serve flipped course formats with active face-to-face interaction rather than passive information regurgitation.

These non-traditional classrooms are made possible by combining the student’s use of asynchronous lectures with the physical attributes of bigger, flatter, faster classrooms.  Learning spaces are bigger to provide more workspace per student than a tablet arm chair in a tiered lecture hall.  Flat floors allow easy rearrangement of furniture to meet the needs of each class.

These spaces also have high-speed digital access, to accommodate accelerating rates of connectivity that increases the value of the in-room experience with remote participants, demonstrations and events.  We should think of the 21s century learning space as a black box theater in which we are all actors.  It is not a high-tech version of a room where once upon a time there were lectures.

Academic librarians turned to digital formats earlier than other faculty members.  They now spend well less than 10 percent of their acquisition budgets on paper.  Late in the 20th century the quality of a library was often measured by its paper holdings.  Now librarians measure their libraries by the quality of student serviced academic support, even as their physical print holdings are shrinking.  Libraries are becoming Goog-Azon-Bucks as they emulate 1) the search functions of Google, 2) the rapid availability of Amazon and 3) the physical service ambience of Starbucks.

While classrooms and libraries are morphing, digital innovations are continuing to challenge assumptions about teaching and learning.  The quality and effectiveness of online and blended pedagogies continues to improve semester by semester.  Advancements in artificial intelligence and outcomes-based learning science are evolving rapidly.

Georgia Tech’s experiment with an online teaching assistant in the form of a digital avatar named “Jill Watson” advanced the practicality and effectiveness of digital learning assistance.  “Jill’s” ability to improve student outcomes continues to ramp up through artificial intelligence.  Even in her first post beta-tested version students, randomly assigned to “Jill” or a human assistant, found “Jill” to be better able to help.  This is only one example of the growing influence of digital modalities to both improve student outcomes and reduce the need for conventional arrangements of space and time.

Changing the Physical Trajectory

Designing campuses for a digital world requires changing the trajectory.  In 2014 my recommendations for campus planners were:

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

I stand by all of these with one geographical qualification.  Some campuses, generally in the south and west, are seeing growth of on-campus enrollment.  For them building more may be appropriate.  At the same time all campuses need to rethink capacity as the physical expectations of campuses morph.  Right-size the whole, rather than build in lockstep with pre-digital assumptions of “if we build it they will come.” This involves managing space and time differently as students and faculty become more transient moving at the speed of digital rather than the speed of paper.

Another academic year begins and higher education continues its shift to online and digital placelessness.  The interwoven strands of physical campuses and digital innovations are leading to an emerging model of both/and rather than either/or.  The physical changes are becoming measurable as the paradigm of “seat time” ebbs.  Traditional physical planning practices need to adapt to support students and faculty, who are everywhere and nowhere.

Methodology

The rest of this post lays out the details and methodology of my estimate of the physical consequences of digital transformation.

It’s self-evident these 2.7 million individual students (750,000 full-time equivalents) earning online credit were not occupying classrooms in any conventional sense.  This is a straightforward reduction in the need for seats and classrooms. Estimating the ripple effect for other types of campus spaces requires a number of judgment calls.

Does an online student need study space on campus? Does an online teacher, often an adjunct, need a campus office? Does the need for administrative and support spaces and offices grow or shrink? How about the student union and recreation centers?

Here are the analytical choices I have made.

  • Students taking only some of their classes online may be living on-campus or near-campus. It is common for resident students to take at least one online course during their time on campus.  As a result my estimates of student life and study space impacts are limited to students taking exclusively online courses.
  • As for faculty offices, online courses are most often taught by adjuncts without conventional office space.  My estimate provides one-half of the typical faculty office space.
  • The estimate assumes no reduction in administrative and support spaces. Online students still require these services and related spaces.

This approach estimates the existing building area that could be reallocated, or remain “unbuilt” because it is not needed as students shift to online programs. For every 10,000 FTE students moving online it is more than 500,000 square feet of building.

Data Sources

How have I made this estimate?  My starting points are all public sources such as the NCES database for distance enrollment and publications of the Society of College and University Planning.   A link to my spreadsheet is here in pdf form.

None of the data sources were intended to be used in this manner.  The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data is for “distance learning” (in this context synonymous with online).  This is the most accurate estimate of the number of students in online courses.  The most current data come from Fall 2016.  The data published in Kings of Infinite Space by the Society of College and University Planning (SCUP) concern the ratio of campus facilities in Assignable Square Feet (ASF) to Full Time Equivalent (FTE) student.  The report was published in 2005, thus its values predate any significant online impacts.  I consider them to be an appropriate benchmark for the pre-digital campus.

Request for comment

I would appreciate comments on the methodology and my observations. The increasing use of digital learning formats in post secondary education will continue to influence campus development.  Informing those responsible for the stewardship and creation of campuses needs to be a team effort.

Learning Spaces Collaboratory – 2017

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Collaboration is a requirement to improve teaching and learning, and events organized by the Learning Spaces Collaboratory are the catalyst.

There are webinars, reports and roundtables throughout the country. These are interventions to a business-as-usual attitude. The core ingredients are urgent conversations among faculty members.

Why are these LSC events necessary? Because improving teaching and learning is enormously difficult for higher education. In Reengineering the University, William Massy identifies several factors including decentralization of teaching activity.

As a former vice provost at Stanford, he has seen this up close. “The benefits of such decentralization are substantial, but a heavy price is extracted when it comes to systemic improvement of teaching and learning.” Decentralization honors the scholarship of the individual instructor but discourages the necessary collaborative action.

Our inboxes are flooded with a range of conferences that are organized to showcase services and equipment. Only occasionally do they engage in conversations about teaching and learning. For LSC, improving teaching and learning is the reason to exist. This work is as important to the future of higher education as OR’s are to healthcare.

Through the leadership of Jeanne Narum, LSC has been at this work for many years. Their upcoming events are another example of the type of interventions required – recognizing the problem and documenting design thinking to describe an appropriate response. Implementation will always require institutional action, but without the catalyzing influence provided by such events, the inertia of the status quo is overwhelming.

Check it out.

Classrooms and ORs

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student-centeredOperating rooms are to hospitals as classrooms are to colleges and universities – mission critical.

They are tiny parts of an institution’s footprint yet essential to the mission. Hospital administrators pay attention to ORs. Provosts rarely give classrooms a second thought. In the digital transformation of higher education effective learning environments are becoming more critical, not less. Inattention to classrooms and learning spaces can be an Achilles heel.

Patient-Centered Operating rooms are part of a much larger patient-centered environment that includes beds and outpatient clinics. A hospital without an operating room is not much of a hospital. Though ORs and surgical support areas make up less than 7% of a hospital’s usable floor area, these small components and the procedures they support are the essence of the hospital. They are among the most carefully built spaces, with extraordinary care taken for every aspect of the physical environment, from air quality to floor vibration.

Not Student-Centered Universities are not student-centered in the way that hospitals are patient-centered. ORs are not located for the convenience of surgeons, however classrooms are located for the convenience of faculty. ORs are part of an integrated patient care environment. Classrooms are balkanized by department, school, and university with different rules pertaining to each.

Classrooms and teaching laboratories are a small part of a university footprint, often less than 7%. These spaces and the experience they support are as essential to the university as ORs are to the hospital. ORs are never an afterthought, classrooms often are. ORs are understood to be strategic assets, classrooms are rarely considered at all, except to be sure that there are enough chairs to satisfy the “butts-in-seats” pro forma.

Examples While ORs have changed dramatically in the last century, classrooms are just beginning to get the care they deserve. A wide spectrum of active learning spaces have resulted from this attention. FLEXspace and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory have growing inventories of examples.

Active learning spaces have more floor area per student than traditional classrooms, and the floors are flat. The combination of floor area and flatness serves the needs of evolving pedagogies. Flexibility for movement and engagement allows reconfiguration for discussion and project work – and writing surfaces are everywhere. At the high-tech end of the spectrum, the rooms have the fastest possible network speed. At the low-tech end, these rooms resemble traditional seminar rooms without a massive central table.

Investing in Obsolescence The rate of improving classrooms is slow, requiring a couple of decades on most campuses. Digital transformation of higher education is accelerating, making time in traditional classrooms evermore important. Still, it is possible to find universities reinvesting scarce capital funding in obsolete teaching spaces. I won’t name the institutions, but it is happening all across the nation. The explanation usually has several sources:

  • senior faculty members who do not wish to change teaching methods
  • lag times of more than a decade between documented need and occupancy
  • ineffectual influence from knowledgeable facilities staff, and
  • indifferent institutional leadership.

All of these factors contribute to the slow change in classrooms, but none more than indifferent institutional leadership. If presidents and provosts saw the classrooms as key to a student centered environment – as a mission critical asset – they would act differently and more urgently. That is what hospital administrators do when they see problems with their ORs.

It takes decades to make significant physical change to a campus-wide array of classrooms – creating more effective and supportive learning environments. Even though poor learning environments are not life threatening, starting the process is urgent. In an increasingly competitive and digital world, physical transformation of learning environments is critical to the education mission.

Neuroscience and Campus – Memory and Place

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tower-stair-2Memory has been tethered to place by human evolution. Campuses have been among these places for more than a thousand years.

The Question  As students and teachers swim further into the digital stream of online education and simulated reality, will place continue to matter?

This question has taken me far beyond the disciplines of brick and mortar. Higher education, sociology, cultural anthropology, student life, academic business, learning analytics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence have all been on my reading list.

My research is not complete, but my tentative conclusion:

For centuries, campus has been part of the standard paradigm. It has always been there – a setting, not a participant. The future of the campus in the learning enterprise depends on being re-designed to be an agent, a necessary supportive ingredient, not just being there.

Continue reading →

Jeanne Narum – Academic Change Agent

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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.