Category Archives: Teaching

Classrooms: Bigger, Flatter, Faster and Fewer

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Even in the digitally driven future of higher education, three-dimensional classroom spaces will be needed.  They won’t be used in the traditional manner and they won’t be the traditional kind.  They will be bigger, flatter, faster and there will be fewer classrooms for the same number of students.

Lectures will continue, but already they occupy less class time.  Pedagogy is changing in and outside of the classroom.  In the classroom, change is not disabling the lecture; it is enabling discussion, teamwork and practical applications. Whether fast or slow, the rate of change is limited by each institution’s culture.  Differences in institutional culture will become evident in the structure of classrooms and what happens there. Continue reading →

To Build, or Not to Build

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UMN.vert.cropUniversity presidents and provosts are always faced with the choice of staying the course or modifying the trajectory of their institutions.  Due to failing business models, rapidly evolving digital competition and declining public support, the stakes are rising.  Some are asking how they should think about the campus built for the 21st century.

My first draft of recommendations:

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

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Hollowed Halls

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Empty lecture hall.sepiaThe empty lecture hall is just one sign of redesign in higher education.  Substituting digital formats for large live lectures is the simplest and earliest stage of higher education redesign.  This process of substituting synthetic for real will take several years and there will be many failed experiments.  Whether in the mega courses offered by Coursera and their ilk, or the burgeoning number of asynchronous on-line offerings of traditional institutions, the availability of higher education is rapidly expanding beyond the traditional constraints of geography and time.  Almost all of the expansion is digital.

The good news is that most of these new digital forms are no worse – and are often better – than the large traditional lecture hall formats.  Most would agree that expanded access to higher education is a good thing for most of the planet’s population.  Daphne Koller considers it to be inappropriate to compare Coursera’s offerings [and other digital products] to face-to-face interaction with the best faculty members.  The only fair comparison is access versus no access. Continue reading →

Real or Synthetic?

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Haggans in PDU 130226Two recent events have brought the paradox of the 21st century campus into sharp focus for me.  First, I taught one of my courses remotely via Google Hangout.  Second, a seminar class allowed students to have an in-class conversation with a veteran Minnesota campus planner and later to engage in a discussion of Mission and Place by Kenney, Dumont and Kenney.

In the first case, technology is pulling us away from the traditional model.  In the second case, the values of the traditional model pull us back to the chairs and tables of three-dimensional space.  Technology is allowing us to reinvent many aspects of what has traditionally been the exclusive domain of higher education as they are pulled into a synthetic digital domain.  As this happens many educators are seeking and often struggling to retain the unique values of the real face-to-face experience.
Continue reading →