Category Archives: Teaching

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.

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 →

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.

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.

Classrooms and the 21st Century Campus

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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

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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 →

DeMillo – Revolution in Higher Education

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DeMillo.3Richard DeMillo began his critique of higher education in Abelard to Apple, starting in 12th century Paris and ending with the rise of MOOCs. In Revolution in Higher Education his critique is more pointed – taking on tenure, governance and accreditation. This is balanced with the stories of innovators who “are making college accessible and affordability.”

A recent conversation about the new book resulted in three videos:

As an academic with Silicon Valley ties and a global perspective, he sees the pros and cons of technology in American colleges and universities as clearly as anyone. DeMillo argues that traditional methods cannot satisfy the need for increased access and affordability. He sees technology as the only means to increase the scale of student opportunity and reduce costs. Continue reading →

Dissolving walls and synchronizing watches

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Studio ClassroomMy campus planning course explores the future of campuses and prepares emerging professionals for these practice settings.

For the first half of the semester I experimented with making the room bigger – dissolving the walls that bound the traditional classroom. On March 3, 2015, for example, our session on the future of the campus included more than 40 students and guests in time zones from Western Europe to British Columbia. The synchronous discussion engaged students with the perspectives of academics and professional campus planners. Continue reading →

The Course: Planning and Design of the University

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Opportunity for Guest Participants – I am teaching Planning and Design of the University:  Future of Campus in a Digital World at Georgia Tech and University of Minnesota.  The course will be open to on-line guest participants.  A schedule for guest participants is here.

Georgia Tech students and in-class presenters will be in an on-campus classroom/studio.  Minnesota students, remote presenters and guest participants will join via web conference.

A limited number of “seats” are available for guest participants, for seven Tuesdays beginning January 20 through March 3, 2015 from 6pm to 8:30 Eastern (5pm to 7:30 Central).  A syllabus for the entire 15 week course is here.

Please let me know of your interest in participating by sending an email before January 15 to mhaggans@umn.edu.  Please put Guest in the subject line.

This guest participant opportunity is made possible by the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota.

 

 

Digital Visible

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Hunt Library Int.2.wcThe physical implications of the digital transformation of higher education are becoming visible. Classrooms and libraries are being retooled in response to changes in basic assumptions that have guided campus development for more than a century. Student housing and campuses are evolving in response to social media and the changing use patterns of members of the campus community.  From classrooms to libraries to residence halls, digital transformation is changing the physical presence and requirements of each institution.

Continue reading →