Tag Archives: Digital transformation

Post-Pandemic Campus

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It seems realistic to anticipate the safe return of campus life sometime in the 21-22 academic year, but the post-pandemic campus will not be the way things were in March 2020.  What will the post-pandemic campus need to become?  How will it differ from the thousand-year tradition of place-based higher education?

Colleges and universities have been changed by the pandemic.  They are now always digital and occasionally physical.  Teaching, studying and working remotely will continue to be available and an option preferred by many.  Time on campus will continue to be both more transient and more valuable. Continue reading →

Campus in the Moment

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In the shade of a tree

Life in pre-cyborg places was a very different experience.  You really had to be there.

         City of Bits, William J. Mitchell, 1996

Time and place have drifted apart.  Campuses were built for a pre-digital age long before we could extend our reach and grasp by digital means.

The connection of education to place has become fluid.  Alexandra den Heijer says it is like “managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas.”  Campuses are just beginning to recognize this new reality.

Continue reading →

Do Campuses Have a Future?

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“The campus reveals the power that a physical place can possess as the             embodiment of an institution’s character.”                                                                                           Campus: An American Planning Tradition      Paul Venable Turner, 1984

Campuses adapted to a digital world will have a future.  It is likely that others along with their institutions will wither into irrelevance.

When I began my work on this topic about ten years ago, it wasn’t clear that any campuses had much of a future.  Analogies to the growing demise of newspapers and shopping malls were widespread.  Digital transformation was underway.  Online courses were growing in quantity, quality and popularity.  Competition from digital alternatives was growing.  Seeing these conditions as existential threats seemed to be reasonable and not overly dramatic.

Some observers were confident that more than a third of existing higher education institutions would close.  Others believed that changes wrought by digital transformation were just another twist in a long history. After all, colleges and universities had gone through multiple periods of change and transformation since their emergence almost 1000 years ago. Each time, institutions adapted and some survived.

It’s a wrap

As I bring my work to a close, it is good to note the errors I have made.  The first was failing to distinguish the implications of financial and demographic pressures from those resulting from technological evolution.  The second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.

Digital Transformation in a Thicket

Through conversation with many faculty and administration members, I came to realize the operational complexity of colleges and universities.  I saw more of the moving parts and I began to appreciate the changing financial and demographic environments in which they operated.  Technology was only one of many forces threatening traditional higher education and changing its campuses.

The challenge became to identify consequences of digital transformation that were hidden in a thicket of issues influencing higher education and its campuses.  While technology has caused, allowed and/or created changes in higher education, I came to understand that these changes were difficult to separate from the bigger waves of demographics and financial patterns.

This realization more than anything explains how a single question led to a decade of work.  I read from a flow of books, research papers, articles, blogs and revisited the history of higher education.  I worked with my students on understanding the planning and design of campuses.  Most important were conversation with faculty, administrators and consultants working in and with colleges and universities.  All helped me to see and understand what was evolving on the ground, within the moving parts.

What was happening?

Pedagogy was changing as faculty members experimented with the potential of online resources.  Coffee was coming into libraries.  At the same time, librarians found the need for more people space and less onsite book storage.  Expectations for study and group workspace was increasing across campuses.  As online resources improved, students and faculty spent less time in classrooms.  Most importantly institutions were less bound to their physical place, the campus.  Several were becoming national and global without any increase in physical footprint.  There’s a lot to unpack there.  I will devote several upcoming posts to do that unpacking.

Campus and Institution are not synonymous

My second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.  The campus, the physical place, is not the institution any more than a religious building is a religion.  In both cases the place/building is a physical expression of the institution/religion.  In early writings I fell into the common practice of making campus and college or university synonymous.  Lately I have become rigorous in using the term campuses only when speaking of physical places in much the same way we distinguish a snail shell from a snail.

To wrap up my work on the future of the physical campus, I am continuing conversations with valued colleagues. I am updating my campusmatters.net blog posts.  Finally, I will be identifying patterns of adaptation and describing the types of campuses taking shape in response to the digital transformation of higher education.

Do Campuses Have a Future?   is adapted from an unpublished manuscript         Campus Matters: Place in a Digital World              Michael Haggans, 2020

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.

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 →