Flexible Learning Ecosystem Prototype

Team: Anna Pravinata, Principal Investigator; Nina Ebbighausen, Project Director; Adam Ariano, Project Coordinator

How can physical spaces be designed to support sustained student-centered learning in higher education?

Pandemic experiences have revealed new demands for student-centered learning, impacting technology, learning spaces, and pedagogy. Our work focuses on physical learning spaces, including their infrastructure and furnishings, both in terms of how spaces influence post-pandemic teaching and learning and how they can adapt in the future to support the ever-evolving demands of higher-ed learning. The main purpose of this work has been to understand drivers for change that have affected or are likely to affect physical learning spaces and then explore the design possibilities for learning environments that are responsive to recent changes in pedagogy and educational discourse and flexible for continued change in the future.

The Flexible Learning Ecosystem prototype is still in development. Its current form was developed in response to existing environmental behavior research and research about learning space typologies paired with a series of workshops with educational, academic, and facilities leadership from multiple higher education institutions. The prototype is formed out of a series of building blocks that support pedagogical flexibility and range, providing a variety of space sizes (small to large), degrees of formality, levels of privacy (internally focused to collaborative), and resources (passive to hands-on). The building blocks can be combined in different ways to fit different needs and settings. In addition, individual learning spaces can be modified quickly and intuitively by the users themselves to support the reactionary and improvisational adjustments required to optimize instructional delivery and student-centered learning.

Funders: Alliance