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When we think about collaborative learning spaces on campus, we're typically talking
about those spaces that foster student engagement with other students and ideally faculty.
A traditional lecture theater is not a great place to work in a group. The furniture, the
layout and the orientation of the room are all saying sit down and listen and watch.
Students want to work differently. Spaces have to change to suit new ways of teaching and learning
For universities to have value, the on campus
experience to have value, we need to provide the other part of learning, which is the working
together, the project, the assignment, the lab work. And those things now are very much
a major part of what a university experience should be.
Formal spaces are those structured spaces on campus that have spatial or time constraints.
Typically we think of this in terms of the 20th century language around classrooms.
On technology we've given the students their own AV system. They are able to share and
collaborate as a group. And we call them pods. And they're very popular. And we have them
both in informal settings and in a classroom setting like the one I'm in.
The informal spaces on campus are basically the other 70 percent of campus. These spaces
could be in the library, in a residence hall, in the pathway or the hallway of academic
buildings and even outdoors. These are the spaces where students can gather together
and feel like they own the space for the time that they occupy it.
Some of the best learning sometimes happens not in the classroom, in the hallway where
a student's asking his colleagues did you understand that?
When the students are working in groups, they will often carry on that learning process
outside of the formal teaching spaces. We'll go and find somewhere nearby whether it's
a cafe or a library or an IT open access space.
We have a stairwell in the center of the building and that tends to be where everybody congregates
and shares what they're doing and what are you working on.
I don't like the term flexible. It has a bad connotation. In the context of learning environments,
I like to use the term pedagogically flexible. That ability to go from an individual student
to a whole group of students and every kind of permutation in between.
I prefer the word versatile as opposed to flexible. I think if you try and meet too
many requirements, you're going to fail. You're not going to please anyone.
Collaborative spaces needed to be flexible, so that you can rearrange the furniture and
rearrange the orientation for different things. However, portable walls and too much flexibility can actually
end up with disuse because people don't know how to operate it.
Collaborative learning environments will vary. I think they do have to be different. You
can't just have one model that fits all. Personally I'm opposed to creating a definitive
template for a collaborative classroom. I think diversity and variety of learning spaces
is a critical thing for students. Easily accessible. They need to be nearby,
I think, professors' offices, so that there's an adjacency there.
They don't have to be large spaces, but they have to be in the right place. Outside the
lecture space or near to a library. Every environment is a learning environment
both interior and exterior. And that's how we have to think when we're designing space.
To make a successful collaborative space, the design team has had to work collaboratively
itself. We really had to work closely with the educators. The architectural team had
to work very closely with the IT team to make all of these pieces work together as a whole.