Another 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.
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I am curious how the projected world population by level of education that is projected at this site play into the thinking? https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
This source states; ‘Breaking down the population by education level is especially interesting: we see that our world will be inhabited by more and more educated people. The visualization below shows that in 1970 there were only around 700 million people in the world who had secondary or post-secondary education. By the end of this century, the number of people with secondary or post-secondary education will have increased 10-fold and will reach 7 billion people (a figure similar to the entire current world population)!”
What will the impact of this enormous growth on both the campus and digital learning environment? Much of the projected growth will be outside of the US, so how many international students will want to access US educational offerings? I would think that the digital arena must expand significantly to accommodate this growth and then the answers to the questions you pose in your post regarding impacts on campus environments will be critical to understand.
Excellent question. First, I should be clear that my work is US centric. At the same time, I scan a wide variety of higher education news feeds and several of these include international trends. So its from this limited perspective, I see: 1) rapid traditional campus development in China, 2) non-US competition for international students (Australia, New Zealand and all manner of European universities) 3) increasing use of online programs in the developing world (even when connectivity is still weak compared to the developed world). Given the time and capital expense of creating traditional campuses, online options would seem to be the best suited to meet the need that demographics predict. Thanks for giving me much to consider.
Michael – Thanks for this. It would seem to be a summation of much of what you have been investigated and thinking about over the last 10 years. One issue which dogs all of us who try to understand what is going on in the larger picture is that each individual campus, each individual Institution, has its own peculiar necessities. It’s much the same issue that sociology has with the individual. Most of the campuses of which I have any intimate knowledge are all probably in the still expanding mode. While they may not be expanding in student population, they are at least marginally expanding in total facilities to either meet the needs of a backlog or seeking better quality to maintain their positions in a competitive world.
For example I have done work on four different UC campuses but no Cal State campuses. There may be Cal State campuses that have more facilities than they need and I am quite sure that most Cal State campuses have more facilities than they can truly properly maintained. But that’s another issue. Nevertheless, finding the proper balance for each individual campus between the physical center and the placeless but necessary circumference of their digital reach is something that administrators must be striving to understand.
The privates I have known either for attending, Dartmouth undergraduate and Penn graduate, or having worked on the campus for example Pomona College seem to be in the position of having much greater demand but then they can reasonably accommodate so I do not see them faced with a hollowing out in the foreseeable future. While, like the UC campuses, I know these private colleges are very much defined by their physical being, both Dartmouth and Penn are very active in their development of and analysis of distance learning. I have taken MOOCs from both institutions. They all will be effected and they know it.
Once again you have given me food for thought and for that I thank you.
Duke
Duke, Thanks for the thoughtful observations. When I write it is easier to paint with a broad brush, so sometimes I don’t focus enough on the details or counter trends. Yes, the demographic and “market” expansions in the West and South continue. This is also true for many of the elite privates. These institutions are continuing to grow physically, but as you suggest, not necessarily to accommodate undergraduates but to satisfy existing unmet needs or to further other institutional goals such as research and community development. That being said, I see a broad swathe of “fly-over” country strewn with institutions that are struggling to thrive. Some are resorting to P3 schemes that bet the future of the institution on enrollment increases that will be difficult to achieve. Others are acting as if a return to pre-2008 funding is possible, or that untapped “out-of-state/international” students will make up the difference. I have called this a “thicket of business issues” and then add (not just for those struggling but for those thriving) the need to recognize the changing balance between place-based and non-place-based pedagogies.
I think the 21st century campus experience will be episodic and interative, enabled by digital transformation. I see this as significant; a change that is as time-based as the baby-boom change was scale-based. Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale and upstarts like Stanford and Cal will continue much as they are. They have the means to do so. But the influences of market and technology will not be uniformly felt or recognized. As a result, my prescriptions may be most applicable to the vast middle, institutions that are still big enough not to fail, yet poorly positioned to thrive.
Thanks for your insightful poking of holes in my arguments. I will being working to sew them up.
Michael
What are your thoughts about the importance of a physical campus to online students that do not use (or cannot use) the physical campus? Does the online student feel an emotional connection to the perceived campus experience? For example, it is my assumption that an online ASU student is going to feel like they are a part of the thriving physical campus experience more so than a University of Phoenix online student that only views a bunch of stock photos of the perceived experience. Do you think connection to a thriving physical campus is a factor in college selection?
What are your thoughts about the importance of a physical campus to online students that do not use (or cannot use) the physical campus?
The campus has been central to the value proposition. The physical place signals the “realness” of the degree. The traditional campus helps to authenticate and validatate of the degree that is earned. So far this has also been part of the evaluation of candidates for most positions. However, the boundary between on-campus and on-line is becoming porous. As institutions become both/and, digital/physical, the distinction between campus and digital will weaken. Still I suspect that the images of the legacy campus will still be part of the package students purchase, even if their personal experience with the campus is fleeting or imagined.
Does the online student feel an emotional connection to the perceived campus experience? For example, it is my assumption that an online ASU student is going to feel like they are a part of the thriving physical campus experience more so than a University of Phoenix online student that only views a bunch of stock photos of the perceived experience.
I think you’re right. I haven’t dealt with the psychology of this distinction, but in the post Neuroscience and Place I wrote about the importance of campus to memory. To this I add the suspicion that online students buy more tee-shirts and window stickers of “their” traditional campuses than the ersatz variety. This is not a good measure of educational value, but an indication of personal connections.
Do you think connection to a thriving physical campus is a factor in college selection?
Yes. Hundreds of institutions like the University of Phoenix have used the term “campus” to refer to storefronts and rented office space. In my view they try very hard to convey a physical mirage. A hybrid approach shows up in the most recent ads for Purdue-Global as Purdue re-labels Kaplan. The images used for online programs and video ads are almost always of “real campuses.” I doubt they would use this approach if it were not considered successful.
Thanks for the questions. You have given me additional avenues to explore.