Category Archives: Place

Do Campuses Have a Future?

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“The campus reveals the power that a physical place can possess as the             embodiment of an institution’s character.”                                                                                           Campus: An American Planning Tradition      Paul Venable Turner, 1984

Campuses adapted to a digital world will have a future.  It is likely that others along with their institutions will wither into irrelevance.

When I began my work on this topic about ten years ago, it wasn’t clear that any campuses had much of a future.  Analogies to the growing demise of newspapers and shopping malls were widespread.  Digital transformation was underway.  Online courses were growing in quantity, quality and popularity.  Competition from digital alternatives was growing.  Seeing these conditions as existential threats seemed to be reasonable and not overly dramatic.

Some observers were confident that more than a third of existing higher education institutions would close.  Others believed that changes wrought by digital transformation were just another twist in a long history. After all, colleges and universities had gone through multiple periods of change and transformation since their emergence almost 1000 years ago. Each time, institutions adapted and some survived.

It’s a wrap

As I bring my work to a close, it is good to note the errors I have made.  The first was failing to distinguish the implications of financial and demographic pressures from those resulting from technological evolution.  The second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.

Digital Transformation in a Thicket

Through conversation with many faculty and administration members, I came to realize the operational complexity of colleges and universities.  I saw more of the moving parts and I began to appreciate the changing financial and demographic environments in which they operated.  Technology was only one of many forces threatening traditional higher education and changing its campuses.

The challenge became to identify consequences of digital transformation that were hidden in a thicket of issues influencing higher education and its campuses.  While technology has caused, allowed and/or created changes in higher education, I came to understand that these changes were difficult to separate from the bigger waves of demographics and financial patterns.

This realization more than anything explains how a single question led to a decade of work.  I read from a flow of books, research papers, articles, blogs and revisited the history of higher education.  I worked with my students on understanding the planning and design of campuses.  Most important were conversation with faculty, administrators and consultants working in and with colleges and universities.  All helped me to see and understand what was evolving on the ground, within the moving parts.

What was happening?

Pedagogy was changing as faculty members experimented with the potential of online resources.  Coffee was coming into libraries.  At the same time, librarians found the need for more people space and less onsite book storage.  Expectations for study and group workspace was increasing across campuses.  As online resources improved, students and faculty spent less time in classrooms.  Most importantly institutions were less bound to their physical place, the campus.  Several were becoming national and global without any increase in physical footprint.  There’s a lot to unpack there.  I will devote several upcoming posts to do that unpacking.

Campus and Institution are not synonymous

My second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.  The campus, the physical place, is not the institution any more than a religious building is a religion.  In both cases the place/building is a physical expression of the institution/religion.  In early writings I fell into the common practice of making campus and college or university synonymous.  Lately I have become rigorous in using the term campuses only when speaking of physical places in much the same way we distinguish a snail shell from a snail.

To wrap up my work on the future of the physical campus, I am continuing conversations with valued colleagues. I am updating my campusmatters.net blog posts.  Finally, I will be identifying patterns of adaptation and describing the types of campuses taking shape in response to the digital transformation of higher education.

Do Campuses Have a Future?   is adapted from an unpublished manuscript         Campus Matters: Place in a Digital World              Michael Haggans, 2020

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.

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.