Improving Student Learning with Well-Designed Academic Facilities

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We see growing awareness at institutions that housing and recreational facilities can serve as learning spaces and as important factors in student success. But what about the academic facilities themselves — classrooms, the academic library, traditional learning spaces? How can these facilities be used more effectively to improve student learning?

To investigate this question, we turned to experts Ken Smith, Virginia Tech’s vice provost for resource management and institutional effectiveness, and Nancy Allen, dean of the main library at the University of Denver.

Redesigning Instructional Space

Smith points to two qualities that define the modern instructional classroom:

  • Ability to support multiple learning activities within the same class period, with minimal disruption. “In today’s classroom, faculty don’t necessarily stand and lecture while students receive information passively,” Smith notes. “The same session may include lecture, group work, and individual work. You need a classroom that can support all three modes of learning with minimal disruption when transitioning between them.”
  • Seamless integration of technology. “Technology should no longer be a feature of the room but a tool that is available in the room to faculty and students. At Virginia Tech, we worked hard to make technology-integrated classrooms similar enough to other classrooms that there isn’t much of a learning curve required in the use of the new space.”

As historical buildings on campus weren’t built with these two qualities in mind, there are a number of implications for revitalizing existing — and likely outdated — instructional spaces on campus. Smith recommends approaching this modernization in a two-step process:

  1. Add high-quality instructional space, affording you additional capacity.
  2. Use that expanded capacity to manage a renovation cycle on older spaces.

The key is to realize that when you improve an older classroom, you almost inevitably lose capacity. “You put in more flexible furnishings and technology integration,” Smith notes, “and you start thinking about sightlines in the room in a different way, you lose some capacity. You make a 50-seat room into a higher-quality 40-seat room or a 35-seat room. This creates issues for the registrar. So you need more efficient scheduling and you need to start by adding capacity with some more modern spaces so that you have room for a renovation cycle.”

You lose some capacity, but the gain is significant. Guessing what pedagogy will be like ten, fifteen, or twenty years from now is a tricky matter, so anywhere that you renovate a space, try to build in flexibility for the future. This ensures that it won’t be an expensive prospect to add or replace technology or to reconfigure that space ten years from now.

“We’re not trying to guess what the future is going to be and build that now; we’re trying to build flexible interiors in our academic buildings so that people in the future can make those informed decisions.”
Ken Smith, Virginia Tech

Developing a More Collaborative Design Process

What’s especially effective about Smith’s process is the extent to which it is open and collaborative. He emphasizes the need to gather early input into design from a wide range of faculty and students, and offers advice on how to seek that input:

SEEKING DESIGN INPUT FROM FACULTY

You can collect faculty input through:

  • One-on-one conversations with faculty and department heads
  • Faculty surveys
  • Focus groups

“We worked to identify faculty who are innovating pedagogically, faculty who are on the cutting edge, as well as ‘day-to-day’ faculty. We wanted input from both.”
Ken Smith, Virginia Tech

Smith also notes that the faculty know the spaces they are teaching in now, so one of the key questions you will want to ask them is: What works and doesn’t work in the spaces you’re using? Smith suggests sending a clear message with the questions you ask and the way that you ask them: “What works, we want to magnify. What doesn’t work, we want to mitigate or reduce. When you present the question that way, it’s very effective. Faculty know what rooms frustrate them.”

SEEKING DESIGN INPUT FROM STUDENTS

Smith also advocates getting more student into classroom design or into desired improvements to existing spaces. He has done this by adding two questions to the course evaluation survey (one inviting students to rate the impact of the learning environment on their learning, and the other inviting open-ended comments on how the learning environment could be made better) and by having more face-to-face interactions with students early on, by being proactive in Q&A events, student government events, and forums where students and those involved in the capital planning process can ask each other questions.

“When you take this approach,” Smith notes, “you can quickly identify the spaces that students are rating low, and then review the open-ended comments. See what can be easily solved and what may be more complex. You can cross-reference this with your space utilization data. So, for example, here is a space that is used by a lot of students and isn’t working well. We need to prioritize that space for renovation; in that way, the most students will be impacted even by small changes. This helps prioritize the limited dollars available for renovation.”

Thinking Outside the Classroom

“Learning spaces aren’t just the classrooms anymore. A lot of learning happens in informal spaces, the spaces where students meet. As you introduce more group learning and group problem-solving into the pedagogy, there are more learning activities happening outside the classroom.”
Ken Smith, Virginia Tech

Smith also recommends integrating informal learning spaces (table space, lounge space) not only into your academic facilities but also into student residence halls, academic libraries, dining facilities, and student life facilities: “intentionally create space that supports students gathering to learn and problem-solve together.”

Three steps to consider:

  • Plan for learning spaces in a variety of locations, remembering that students gather and learn at all hours.
  • Ensure that all of your facilities — not just classrooms — have flexibility for integrating technology. You might not be able to predict what the institution may find it useful to add into a learning space outside the classroom ten years from now.

Revitalizing the Academic Library

Given both technological advances that enable easy access to digital content, changes in the way that people interact with scholarly communications and collections, and a shift toward thinking of the library as learning space rather than a storage and retrieval space, academic libraries especially are evolving rapidly. We reached out to Nancy Allen, the dean of the University of Denver’s main library, to talk about key considerations. DU recently completed a ten-year planning process and updated its longstanding Penrose Library to the Anderson Academic Commons.

“Recent library building projects demonstrate how we can shift from libraries optimized for storage of paper to libraries optimized for student and faculty learning experiences. We are optimizing now as providers of learning spaces. We have to figure out how to reconsider space, information services, and partnerships with key academic support services to provide for learning experiences in the library. The academic library has the opportunity to be more than the library ever used to be.”
Nancy Allen, University of Denver

FEATURES OF THE NEW ANDERSON ACADEMIC COMMONS

  • Provides a very selected collection of paper materials, chosen based on use data and with the goal of helping faculty succeed in research and helping students see success in assignments
  • A new fast-turnaround delivery system for access to stored collections
  • Increased ease of access to digital collections
  • More space allocated to seating and learning spaces, with workspaces for individual students and for learning communities
  • Co-located IT services, equipment, staffing, space, and software — “a gathering together of the resources needed for students to succeed”
  • Academic support services, offered across multiple service providers but co-located and organized to support the student’s journey from inquiry (where students are supported by a research center) to expression (where students are supported by a writing center that reports to the provost’s office); “because students move through that process every time they write a research paper, the library becomes a key site for inter-office collaboration to support that process”
  • Space and programming for additional “learning moments,” such as a data analysis and visualization center to support faculty research; a space allocated specifically for events that draws hundreds of students weekly to the library facility; and an active exihibits and display program, featuring not just special and archival collections but information and videos about the history of the university

Asked about early steps to take in ensuring that a library is designed and planned to fully meet the needs of the campus — and asked about what steps institutions too often overlook, Nancy Allen emphasized collaboration and offered a number of examples and critical considerations. “We’ve demonstrated at DU that collaborative planning yields rewards for libraries (increased traffic, increased learning),” she notes. “It is well worth the investment of time and effort.”

The key first step, Allen states, is relationship development. “Find out who the key stakeholders in library space and programming really are, and engage those unit leaders in thinking about how we can use library space together to deliver better programs to students and faculty”:

  • “Work with the writing program not just to allocate square feet to think about how library and writing center staff should work together, and how library and writing programs can be woven together into a fluid experience that works for students in writing-intensive courses”
  • “Engage in joint planning with technology services: how can we coordinate referrals across information services, creating a queue of software support requests that we might each ask of the other and coordinating ticket referrals”

“Do program planning and develop mutual dependencies and interdependencies prior to space planning. How do we leverage each other’s strengths to do what we do better? That is the best possible result of collaborative planning. This takes time, and it takes listening. Listen until you understand what others need to help students succeed. Then build a place where that can happen, approaching space planning knowing very clearly what you need.”
Nancy Allen, University of Denver

In a world where libraries become sites intentionally designed to support all stages of the student learning process, the key prerequisite for successful capital planning is going to be the partnership-building, silo-breaking, and information-gathering that will ensure that the design truly responds to the learning needs of the library’s users.

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