Campus Futures – Two Insightful Voices

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Academia Next scans beyond the horizon to lay out possible futures for higher education.  Campus of the Future recognizes the evolving physical state of campuses. Both books will be available in early 2020.  Filled with insights into the future of campuses, each is the result of years of study.

Academia Next by Bryan Alexander considers the morphing of higher education with particular attention to technology and the near-term consequences of demographic and economic trends.  Before making the daring move of imagining higher education beyond 2035, he lays out seven scenarios for the near-term.

Scenarios

Alexander draws these scenarios from current trends and his work with scores of colleges and universities.  All these institutions are dealing with the consequences of the last 20 years of transformation in higher education.  All are facing existential crises for the next 20 years and beyond.  Alexander offers no glib answers.  As he sees it, “much of American higher education now faces a stark choice:  commit to experimental adaptation and institutional transformation often at serious human and financial costs, or a painful decline into an unwelcoming century.”

“Peak Higher Education” is baked in current demographic and economic trends, plausible and not particularly hopeful, with American higher education in decline.  More hopeful trajectories are found in “Health Care Nation,” “Open Education Triumphant” and “Renaissance”.  These three rely on a public consensus that higher education is a public value rather than a private good.  “Retro Campus” posits institutions that intentionally reject technology in order to find better ways of teaching and learning.

As a former university architect, I am most intrigued by “Siri, Tutor Me” and “Augmented Campus.”  The first imagines the benefits of artificial intelligence combined with advances in learning analytics.  In this scenario traditional face to face instruction would be valued to the extent that it “either differs from software or reproduces the “tutorware’s best features.”    Many will find this a scary prospect, but continued improvements in tutoring software and learning analytics are on the way.  Many students may find them most attractive, particularly when compared to current alternatives.

From my study of the digital transformation of higher education and what it means for traditional campuses, I find Alexander’s “Augmented Campus” most compelling.  In this scenario, institutions dive more deeply into digital means and methods.  The distinction between on-campus and off-campus, classroom instruction and on-line learning are blurred to a vanishing point.  At the same time, the physical matter of campuses must be adapted to this new reality.  In the Netherlands, Alexandra den Heijer has found just the right metaphor to help understand the augmented campuses that are already taking shape.

Campus of the Future

Campus of the Future by Alexandra den Heijer has an exquisite sub-title:  managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas. In those few words, she has captured the physical consequences of higher education’s existence in the 21st century. She comes at this from the vantage point of the Delft University of Technology.  TUDelft has become a global institution with more than 2.5 million students world-wide, including 25,000 attending on-campus.  It is well on a path of experimental adaptation and institutional transformation.

Her recent inaugural address (here) as Professor of Architecture and the Built Environment, den Heijer summarizes her theory and practice of shaping the future of her institution and others in Europe.  Campus of the Future frames the existence of the institution in three states of matter:  solid, liquid and gas:  campus (exclusive and territorial), network(interactive and shared), and virtual (place independent and personal).  All three states are part of the planning and design problem facing TUDelft and other 21st century universities.

This is the seventh book in a series addressing the issues of the 21st century campus.  A single data point shows the power of this work.  In the last 25 years, the traditional student body of TUDelft has increased by 113% while the net building area has increased by only 2.5%.  This is an astonishing result accomplished by 1) modernizing heritage buildings, 2) demolishing obsolete structures, 3) adding net new space sparingly, and 4) efficient management of space and time of use.

These strategies are grounded in the belief that better is better, not bigger is better.  American campus planners and facility managers have much to learn from the work of der Heijer and her team.  Among other things, they have developed Smart Tools utilizing a wide range of data-driven efficiency metrics for the management of space and time. These tools have informed the creation of 21st century-appropriate student and faculty centered environments.  At the same time the carbon footprint of the institution has been reduced.

Voices worth hearing

Both Academia Next and Campus of the Future will inspire fresh ways of thinking about the future of higher education; at once familiar and strange, different than we might have imagined.

The approaches and perspectives of Alexander and den Heijer could not be more different, geographically or professionally.  One is based in the wonkiness of futurism and the other is grounded in the stone and steel of place.  They both understand the forces changing higher education and point to the campuses that will result.  Their voices are worth hearing.

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 →

Dissolving Campus Edge

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Campuses traditionally had physical edges.  Boundaries marked by walls, gates and signs defined ownership and identity.  While these markers remain, many institutions have made their boundaries less distinct. Students and faculty move seamlessly back and forth from physical to digital, from the campus to its digital doppelgänger.

Projects across the country point to hybridization – a morphing of building types and fluid patterns of use.  These are not just nearby storefront classrooms or branch campuses; nor are they whole new campus projects 10 time zones away. These are different.  Retail enterprises dealt with this phenomenon as their brick and mortar stores encountered Amazon and its ilk.  The buzzword of choice was phygital.

Innovative programmer/planner of campus environments, Elliot Felix has used the term phygital to describe his firm’s academic library projects.  The Hunt Library at North Carolina State is an early example.  The library and its resources are first digital and then physical, reversing the conventional understanding.  Libraries organized around this inversion, are better suited to meet the needs of faculty members and students living in the flow of digital/physical life and learning. Continue reading →

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.

Online Shift – Everywhere and Nowhere

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Everywhere and NowhereAnother 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.

Purdue Global: Hybrid or Mutant?

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When Purdue University acquired Kaplan, a new higher education organism was created. Is it a hybrid or a mutant? It grafts the DNA of a for-profit storefront operation onto the trunk of a traditional Big-10 university.

Purdue-Kaplan, now branded as Purdue Global, is a high-stakes experiment in academic horticulture.  It is an acquisition model, rather than an organic growth approach followed by many others. At risk is the value of the Purdue brand that has taken more than a century to build.

Traditionalists have been fighting a rear guard action against the digital transformation of higher education.  They have been husbanding the remaining twigs of the medieval university.  Perhaps avoiding resistance from traditionalists justified the Kaplan acquisition to rapidly expand Purdue’s online presence. Continue reading →

Online Education Impacts Campuses – 2017

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Equivalent of 500,000 undergrads are only online

Is traditional undergraduate campus building space being made less necessary by online education? Yes.

The growth of online education is depressing the need for the brick and mortar of campuses just like online sales are reducing the need for retail space. In fall 2015 the scale of the undergraduate impact was      12 Arizona States or          52 Harvards.

 

So far more than 23 million square feet of traditional campus space has been obviated by online education. This space is existing and unbuilt.

  • Existing – excess space that is no longer needed; and
  • Unbuilt – space that need not be built.

Continue reading →

Return to a Medieval Form: Unbundling College

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Higher education has been moving toward an unbundled model in which students can buy what they want and disregard the rest. It is like getting the cable channels you view and not paying for the rest. It is almost as if students were beginning to hire their professors.

Once upon a time groups of students did hire instructors. Classes met on a transient basis wherever and whenever they could find space. Students were from many nations. They were often poor and their instructors, since they were employed depending on student demand, were not very well off either. Students and academics found cities to be more hospitable for education than enclaves in the country.

The year was 1088, the place was Bologna. A few years later the experiment was repeated in Paris. These fledgling enterprises soon earned royal charters and began to be administered by the church, and so ended the entrepreneurial, unbundled nature of those start-ups. 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.

Classrooms and ORs

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student-centeredOperating rooms are to hospitals as classrooms are to colleges and universities – mission critical.

They are tiny parts of an institution’s footprint yet essential to the mission. Hospital administrators pay attention to ORs. Provosts rarely give classrooms a second thought. In the digital transformation of higher education effective learning environments are becoming more critical, not less. Inattention to classrooms and learning spaces can be an Achilles heel.

Patient-Centered Operating rooms are part of a much larger patient-centered environment that includes beds and outpatient clinics. A hospital without an operating room is not much of a hospital. Though ORs and surgical support areas make up less than 7% of a hospital’s usable floor area, these small components and the procedures they support are the essence of the hospital. They are among the most carefully built spaces, with extraordinary care taken for every aspect of the physical environment, from air quality to floor vibration.

Not Student-Centered Universities are not student-centered in the way that hospitals are patient-centered. ORs are not located for the convenience of surgeons, however classrooms are located for the convenience of faculty. ORs are part of an integrated patient care environment. Classrooms are balkanized by department, school, and university with different rules pertaining to each.

Classrooms and teaching laboratories are a small part of a university footprint, often less than 7%. These spaces and the experience they support are as essential to the university as ORs are to the hospital. ORs are never an afterthought, classrooms often are. ORs are understood to be strategic assets, classrooms are rarely considered at all, except to be sure that there are enough chairs to satisfy the “butts-in-seats” pro forma.

Examples While ORs have changed dramatically in the last century, classrooms are just beginning to get the care they deserve. A wide spectrum of active learning spaces have resulted from this attention. FLEXspace and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory have growing inventories of examples.

Active learning spaces have more floor area per student than traditional classrooms, and the floors are flat. The combination of floor area and flatness serves the needs of evolving pedagogies. Flexibility for movement and engagement allows reconfiguration for discussion and project work – and writing surfaces are everywhere. At the high-tech end of the spectrum, the rooms have the fastest possible network speed. At the low-tech end, these rooms resemble traditional seminar rooms without a massive central table.

Investing in Obsolescence The rate of improving classrooms is slow, requiring a couple of decades on most campuses. Digital transformation of higher education is accelerating, making time in traditional classrooms evermore important. Still, it is possible to find universities reinvesting scarce capital funding in obsolete teaching spaces. I won’t name the institutions, but it is happening all across the nation. The explanation usually has several sources:

  • senior faculty members who do not wish to change teaching methods
  • lag times of more than a decade between documented need and occupancy
  • ineffectual influence from knowledgeable facilities staff, and
  • indifferent institutional leadership.

All of these factors contribute to the slow change in classrooms, but none more than indifferent institutional leadership. If presidents and provosts saw the classrooms as key to a student centered environment – as a mission critical asset – they would act differently and more urgently. That is what hospital administrators do when they see problems with their ORs.

It takes decades to make significant physical change to a campus-wide array of classrooms – creating more effective and supportive learning environments. Even though poor learning environments are not life threatening, starting the process is urgent. In an increasingly competitive and digital world, physical transformation of learning environments is critical to the education mission.