Time and place have fallen apart.

Howard Mansfield says that time and place began to fall apart, as time zones were introduced 1892 severing clock time from solar time.  The gap between time and place has been growing since then.  By 1953 computer scientists were using the term “real time” to distinguish between their clock time and the different time that existed in the processes of the machines they were building.

Place and time continue to move further apart.  Digital media are literally placeless.  In higher education, it is possible to access the sound and image of the best presentations on any subject at any moment.  Place means less.  We can pause or “rewind” at will, thus manipulating time without regard for place.

We are making a transition toward a campus that accommodates this different time-scape.  Instructors talk of the “nearly now” world in which their students juggle multiple streams of digital information even in those few occasions that they are “face to face.”  This is an asynchronous realm in which content is distributed by all manner of methods regardless of location. This is a context that is as fluid as bricks are solid.  Higher education is moving into an increasingly asynchronous and placeless mode. I call it synchronish.

This transition is well underway, with dramatic increases in hybrid courses and rapidly evolving forms and providers.  In a sense, some traditional campuses become digital hybrids.  Even students at traditional campuses are taking more courses online.  Typically at traditional universities three-quarters of their “distance learning” students are not “distance learning” students.  They live on campus.  Regardless of where they live, students and their instructors spend less time on campus in the traditional settings of the classroom and lab.  This trend is accelerating as students see that they have more options.

Enrollment Shifts  More telling are the enrollments of once traditional institutions that are adapting to this new reality as a means of survival.  One campus in a state system has only a third of its students on campus.  Most of the rest are in Asia.  Absent those students, this institution’s enrollment would be shrinking rather than growing.  Absent this tuition growth, the institution would be losing rather than gaining financial strength.  Many factors are at work, but this would not be possible without an asynchronous and placeless context.

Another campus in the same state system has only 5% of its students off-campus, and most of those live within easy driving distance.  This institution’s enrollment is shrinking as location-based demographic trends limit its reach.  The first institution is well-positioned for a more fluid environment; the second is limited by the inflexibility of its model that relies on traditional bricks.

Facilities Implications  As campuses move to an existence that is more dependent on digital products, they will need fewer square feet of building area per full time equivalent student; or to be more precise, less building area required for each credit hour created and less energy used per credit hour.  In effect existing campuses have more capacity, even within the same walls.  If their enrollments don’t increase, that capacity will be exceed their needs.

This change is just now beginning to appear as campuses adapt to a new synchronish reality.  It is not possible to stitch time and place back together.  But campus can be designed and managed to support and enrich for those formative though transient occasions when students and faculty do actually share time and place.  We can no longer assume that it will happen just because it always has.

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