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.

Why

To be sure the veteran and the newbie need support from their colleges and universities.  In all but the most “corporatized” institutions, teaching methods come down to the efforts of individual instructors.  With increasing resolve instructors are moving to blended models that combine in-class and online course elements.  Those making this move have learning science behind them in addition to their own anecdotal experiences of witnessing “aha” moments.

Active learning and blended classes enable better learning outcomes than traditional lectures.  This was first documented in STEM fields.  Studio classes in art and design fields have long used these techniques. Recent efforts are expanding these techniques to other disciplines.  Practitioners tell me they do not see any disciplines in which these methods will not improve instruction.

The move to blended courses has been slow, but is picking up speed.  Yet all too often existing classrooms are limiting factors.

“For a course that relies heavily on in-class activities, the right classroom layout is imperative… One reason for doing many in-class activities is to increase interactions between the instructor and students, and having the wrong classroom design can hinder interactions … and limit the types of activities that can be done in class, further reducing the benefits of a blended course.”  Lauren Margulieux, Blended Learning in Practice, 281.

We all understand that large lecture halls constrain interactions between instructors and students, but as Margulieux points out, even smaller settings can be problematic.  Most existing rooms are ill suited for the types of problem-based active learning experiences that are essential to blended learning. Technological bells and whistles of digital hardware are not required.  Bigger, flatter, faster classrooms are.

How

Nobody understands this better than Jeanne Narum. She and her colleagues, at Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC), have produced a wealth of resources [here, here and here] for instructors and designers.  They may also help to convince administrators who are often behind the curve.

LSC and like-minded groups have been prodding institutions to view their learning spaces as strategic assets.  Their work on how has informed and improved academic facilities projects throughout the US and Canada.  A new set of case studies has just been released to add to the LSC library of resources.

Publications and case studies can catalyze action.  So can face-to-face events, like the LSC 2019 National Colloquium, November 1-3, 2019. There are three themes:

• The experience of all 21st century learners/users
• Planning for assessing 21st century ecosystems for learning
• Permeability: The future of 21st century learners & learning spaces

Center of Campus

Learning spaces and what happens there have always been at the center of a campus’ reason to exist – now more than ever. A growing range of alternatives is fraying the edges defining higher education.  These are existential challenges for both disciplines and institutions.  Competition keeps coming from all directions.

Accelerating blended learning is about more than competing with digital alternatives.  It makes face-to-face instruction as good as it can be. It is best practice.  To do less could be called malpractice.  Not creating spaces supporting blended learning would be another form of malpractice.

Lauren Margulieux, her colleagues and a generation of learning science have documented the why and how of blended learning.  Jeanne Narum and her colleagues continue to be catalysts for instructors, designers and administrator with the why of changing learning spaces and the examples of how it is done.

Those working to improve teaching and learning spaces where it can thrive should be bold in repeating these stories of why and how.  The future of the campus is the story that will be told.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.