For many people, the publicimage of higher education isthe classroom: faculty talking,with students intently listen-ing and taking notes. Stu-dents’ progress toward a de-gree is measured by time
spent in classrooms. The daily pulse of a col-lege or university is largely dictated by theclassroom schedule as bells ring and thehalls fill with students and faculty rushing tothe next class. Many educators, however, in-creasingly argue that such classrooms arelargely ineffective as learning environmentsand that they should not continue to bebuilt.1 But what should take their place? Inconsidering the future of the learning space,we will discuss (1) a few of the reasons whytraditional classrooms are inadequate andneed to change, (2) some ideas that break
with these traditions, and (3) suggested areasfor the planning team to keep in mind so thatthe team can come up with ideas for futurelearning spaces that are pioneering ratherthan imitative.
Changing the ClassroomThe research on education is full of disap-pointing findings about what graduates can’tdo, don’t understand, or misunderstand.Many college graduates are unable to applymuch of what they have been taught.2 Part ofthe problem may be the classrooms in whichthose students were taught: certain kinds ofspaces make it too easy to teach by “deliv-ery”—broadcasting knowledge from the in-structor’s mouth toward the student’s brain—while making it awkward to teach in waysthat, research suggests, can produce deeper,more lasting learning.
Phillip D. Long is Senior Strategist for the Academic Computing Enterprise, and Director, Learning Out-reach, for MIT iCampus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stephen C. Ehrmann is Vice-President of The TLT Group and Director of its Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement ofEducational Uses of Technology.
Prediction is verydifficult, especially of the future.—Niels Bohr
The release in 1999 of How People Learnbrought together the current knowledgeabout the neuroscience, behavior, andpsychology of learning. These ideas canbe organized around five themes:
1. Memory, and structure of knowledge2. Analysis of problem-solving and
reasoning3. Early foundations4. Metacognitive processes and self-
regulatory capabilities5. Cultural experience and community
participation
Learning, accordingto the authors, isregulated by boththe biology and theecology of the indi-vidual: “ Learningp ro d u ce s develop-ment.”3 The class-room has been a crit-i c a l , a n d c o s t l y,component of thisecology.
Thirty years ear-lier, Edgar Dale haddescribed what hecalled the “experi-ence cone,” whicho r d e r s d i f f e r e n tmodes of learningaccording to theirpower (see Figure1 ) . 4 R e t e n t i o n i sw o r s t w i t h t h e
modes at the top of this cone and best withthose at the bottom. More recently, au-thentic learning has been a topic in theteacher-preparation debate, with futureteachers being “urged to use student-centered, constructivist, depth-versus-breadth approaches in their educationclasses”5 yet finding themselves beingtaught by traditional teaching ap-proaches. “Don’t do as I do, but do as I say”turns out to be a particularly ineffectivemodel for long-term behavior.
So the first requirement for someportion of classrooms of the future is thatthey support coaching and instruction
while the student isd o i n g w h a t t h estudent is learningto do. Students canlearn meaning in ad i s c i p l i n e w h e nteaching/learningactivities are organ-i z e d a r o u n d t h ecore processes andtools of the disci-pline. Today thishappens most ofteni n t h e a r t s a n d ,sometimes, in pro-fessions. For exam-ple, some engineer-
ing schools guidefirst-year and senior
students through a sequence of increas-ingly challenging engineering tasks.6
A second way in which facilities canfoster learning concerns context. Imag-ine two novices learning French. One ofthem sits in an empty room, listening to aneutral voice recite French words andthen repeating them. The other is inFrance, watching as French people talkwith one another, gesture, and point.Even though the French is spoken morequickly and casually in France, thelearner will be able to use situational cuesto interpret what’s being said. This is situ-ated learning. Situated learning is impor-tant for many reasons, not the least beingthat the student learns about the circum-stances under which it is appropriate toapply what has been learned: when thelearning fits and when it doesn’t.
A third important feature for a learn-ing space is the ability to interact, on a va-riety of levels, with both experts andpeers. It’s no coincidence that at least four(faculty-student contact, student-studentcollaboration, rapid feedback, and com-municating high expectations) of theseven research-based principles of goodpractice in undergraduate education haveto do with interpersonal interaction.7
A fourth characteristic relates to “lo-cation, location, location.” Where doesacademic learning really take place? Wefocus in this article on the rooms whereinstructors and students interact—because these facilities are expensive tocreate, renovate, and maintain and be-cause they shape the daily schedule ofmost academic institutions. But ofcourse much, perhaps most, learningcurrently occurs outside these rooms. AnMIT study of how students in an under-graduate design course in the Depart-ment of Aeronautical and AstronauticalEngineering spent their time over the se-mester demonstrated that studentsquickly extended their academic workbeyond the course meeting time (see Fig-ure 2). And when faculty and administra-tors in several workshops conducted bySteve Ehrmann were asked to describethe most significant learning experi-ences of their college years, respondentsrarely mentioned classrooms. Insteadthey talked about other areas on and offcampus. Our question, however, is“What kinds of classroom designs might
44 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
READ
LISTEN
VIEW IMAGES
WATCH MOVIE
GO TO EXHIBIT
WATCH DEMO
SEE IT DONE SITE
PARTICIPATE IN DISCUSSION
GIVE A TALK
SIMULATE REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE
DO THE REAL THING
Passive
Active
Figure 1: The “Experience Cone”
Source: J. Huang, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, personalcommunication. Adapted from Edgar Dale, Audiovisual Methods in Teaching,3d ed. (New York: Dryden Press, 1969).
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Wk 1 Wk 2 Wk 3 Wk 4 Wk 5
Stu
de
nt
Cre
dit
Ho
urs
Room Usage by Work Interval
Week of Semester11 to 9 5 to 11 9 to 5
Figure 2: Room Usage for Academic Coursework over the First Five Weeks of the Term
Source: E. Crawley and S. Immrich, “Process for Designing Learning Spaces,Case Study: The MIT Learning Lab for Complex Systems,” presentation toNLII Learning Systems Design Workshop, 2004.
46 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
be better at supporting important learn-ing in college?”
In summary, these four ideas can beuseful in imagining classrooms of thefuture:
1. “Learning by doing” matters.2. Context matters.3. Interaction matters.4. Location of learning matters.
Breaking Out of the Box:Classrooms Designed for LearningClassrooms should support the activitiesof effective learning: that is, situated, col-laborative, and active learning. Whatmight such spaces look like? Do any suchspaces exist yet?
Buildings That Embody Professional EducationIn the late 1990s, the Department ofAeronautical and Astronautical Engi-neering at MIT confronted the problemof teaching a twenty-first century subjectin a turn-of-the-twentieth-century build-ing. As the demand to do somethingabout the decaying physical space in-creased, so did the need to address a newcurriculum for a new age. There is noth-ing like the threat of self-preservation tomotivate change. In this case, decliningenrollments placed pressure on the de-partment to do something different. For-tuitously, but perhaps catalytically, amajor demographic bubble led to signifi-cant turnover in the composition of thedepartmental faculty, and a young de-partment chair was appointed to lead thefaculty through this difficult transition.
The department developed a curricu-lum model that stressed fundamentaltenets of engineering set in an interactivelearning framework of Conceive, Design,Implement, and Operate (CDIO)8 sys-tems and products. Using a structured ap-proach to identify the abilities requiredfor a contemporary engineer, a “require-ments document” was generated to pro-
vide the CDIO “syllabus.” This becamethe basis for building the workshop-laboratory-classroom environment.
A critical element in the design of newlearning spaces is the need to design forchange. Usage patterns measured overthe years since the CDIO curriculumspaces were built have demonstrated thatstudents are not always using the new fa-cilities in the ways the faculty originallyimagined. The department continues toadapt its spaces in order to best fit the cur-riculum as it is practiced by the studentsand faculty.
Buildings and Campuses as Learning SpacesArchitecture is no longer merely a con-tainer within which learning happens—buildings themselves can provide severaldimensions of support for learning. Infact, the building system elements thatwork together to support learning areanalogous to the functionality sets foundin complex computer systems. Together,they form a building operating system (BOS).
The following are some of the tech-nologies and learning activities that thesenew BOSs will need to support:
■ Capture/replay “think through”: pro-cessing real-time recording (ad hoc)without destroying the social comfortof the group and while providing ap-propriate degrees of privacy; particu-larly challenging will be capturing
audio in small-group conversationsthat occur when large classes meet in asingle room
■ Writeable surfaces—everywhere in theclassroom—that capture and storeeverything written on them (see, forexample, <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/eclass/>)
■ Real-time blogging in the classroom—students building collaborative noteson the course site or a wiki
■ Classroom chat rooms—for example,with a teaching assistant (TA) monitor-ing students’ meta-conversation, in-cluding a TA-moderated Instant Mes-saging “back channel”
■ Dynamically available bandwidth pro-visioned to and within a room, allow-ing students to safely access anddownload rich media objects withoutchoking the local network segment
■ Ubiquitous access to videoconferenc-ing, so simple and intuitive that multi-site conversations are “natural” exten-sions of classroom discussion
■ Video/data-enhanced real-time cap-ture and asynchronous discussionand annotation tools
■ Tools enabling ad hoc guest instructorsteaching from a distance to easily usethe full set of classroom technologies
From Ubiquitous Computing to Situated ComputingNot all advances in learning spaces needto directly support more situated, active,and collaborative learning. Some can dothis indirectly by reducing some of thewasted time and rigidity often experi-enced by faculty in today’s high-techclassrooms.
Mobile devices and widespread con-nectivity have led to 100 percent access toinformation, always-on services, and“anytime, anywhere” learning. The placeis becoming irrelevant. Thus, if impor-tant parts of learning occur when thelearner is outside “classrooms,” then thetechnology carried by, or available to, the
Classrooms should support the activities ofeffective learning: situated, collaborative, andactive learning. What might such spaces look like?
learner in that space needs to provide ap-propriate capabilities. And the technol-ogy (mobile or static) needs to alert thelearner about what can be done in thatsetting.
For example, imagine being able toembed, in specific physical locations, sit-uational instructions that would tell stu-dents’ devices how they should be config-ured and behave while in that localenvironment. After all, when someonewalks into a physical space, there aresigns that say to behave in certain ways, tokeep one’s voice down, not to eat food, orto prepare for a certain kind of activity.Likewise, students entering a testingspace where high-stakes assessments areperformed might find their laptop com-puters configured to restrict access toonly certain network locations or tolaunch only specific applications.
Colleges and universities will needto shift their mixture of dedicated,discipline-specific learning environ-ments, typified by laboratories and otherspaces that remain technically defined, toa focus on (1) self-discovering virtual net-works delivering secure services toportable devices that dynamically joinand depart the building operating sys-tem, and (2) spaces supporting sets of in-teractions with corresponding technolo-gies optimized for particular locallyidentified goals. At the lowest level, thesetwo technical requirements mean that in-dividual devices, whether fixed or mo-bile, can be interconnected to performtasks that routinely go together.
Imagine you’re a faculty member. Foryour class on Tuesday, you plan to displayimages, invite a colleague from anotherinstitution for a fifteen-minute Q&Awith the students, and give a quiz. Thissequence of information is already“known,” since it’s on your course sched-ule page. The building network in whichyour class takes place has an event profilegenerated by your schedule. The profile“knows” the tasks that some of the build-ing infrastructure will be asked to per-form on Tuesday at 3:00 pm (your coursemeeting time).
When you enter the classroom to pre-pare for the session, the building networkregisters your presence from the RFID tagon your ID, retrieves the profile, and notifiesthe relevant devices using Internet 0 proto-cols.9 The display devices are activated, wait-ing for the video source. The computer up-loads the information about the plannedquiz to the network so that when the quiz isstarted, the router configuration for theroom disables external IP access, limitingstudents’ browser and search tools. (Thoughyou had hoped to disable the peer-to-peercommunications, the student privacy boardruled to limit the dynamic setting of accesscontrol on personally owned machines.)The room lighting configuration is modifiedaccording to your preferred lighting pattern,and capture tools in the room prompt youwith default names for the class session,date, and storage location so that you canmodify these if you wish. By default, yourcapture profile will record and store thevideo, audio, and any surface writing (whatwas once known as “writing on the board”).You’ve also elected to have key words gener-ated; these will be included as metadata tothe lecture text that is recorded, digitized,transferred to text, and posted in the courseonline workspace. The room-managementwindow on your portable computer acceptsyour “ok” to leave it as is, and you’re ready toteach.
Students entering the room have thechoice of opting into auto-attendance
recording (showing up counts for 10percent of the grade). Their preferredinformation-distribution channels arenoted, and once their presence is con-firmed, information is transferred fromthe course workspace to their preferredworkspace. That might be their com-puter, their online workspace, or in somecases, their handheld device of choice.
Such a facility has several advantages,most notably the flexibility with which itcan be reconfigured—hour by hour, dayby day, year by year, decade by decade.
Many traditional facilities for situatedlearning—for example, laboratories andlibraries—will also need to be reconfig-ured to better support collaborative workamong people from different disciplines.Graduates who work skillfully in interdis-ciplinary teams will have been educatedby learning, for a significant portion oftheir time, in interdisciplinary teams. Un-less students have significant experienceworking in teams to draw from severaldisciplines in order to solve thorny prob-lems, graduates will not magically masterthat skill set. So the facilities in whichthey learn and apply their learning needto be supportive of the work of (novice)team members.10
Distributed Real-Time ClassroomsImportant aspects of higher educationconsist of one or more instructors help-ing a group of students understand some-thing by talking to and with them. Re-search studies show that there is nospecial magic in delivering a presentationby saying the words to people who arephysically present.11 Whether the wordsare spoken or read, whether the messageis heard or seen, whether the learner isnearby or distant, a presentation is a pres-entation is a presentation. On average, thelearning results are the same.
So, should all lectures be translatedinto readings and digitized? We certainlyneed to go some distance in that direc-tion. Faculty time is too precious to waste
48 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
Whether the words are spoken or read, whether the mes-sage is heard or seen, whether the learner is nearby ordistant, a presentation is a presentation is a presentation.
it doing something that a streaming videocould do as well or better (students canreplay streaming content as many timesas they like in order to grasp a subtlepoint, and they can watch such lecturesanytime and anywhere they need to).
However, there are many reasons whyinteractive lectures—lectures that are in-fluenced, moment by moment, by thestudents—are likely to continue to be use-ful. If students feel that the instructor ispaying attention to them, interactive lec-tures can help motivate them and makethem think about what is being dis-cussed. Faculty can adjust content “on thefly” in response to students and to recentchanges in the discipline. Good lecturesare the educational equivalent of goodperformance art, and some faculty areartists in this medium. Unfortunately,however, that’s not true of all faculty allthe time, so rethinking the balance ofbroadcast and engaged interaction cansignificantly leverage those face-to-facelectures with technology that augmentscollaboration.
Shifting some or most one-way pre-sentations from face-to-face to homework
(that process began years ago with text-books and readings) frees time for moreinteractive formats, when students canschedule times to interact with facultyand other students. Asynchronous inter-action and project work can be donewhen students are outside classroomstoo. The challenge, as all faculty know, ishow to be sure that students come to classprepared. Fortunately, technology canhelp.
To help students come to the class-room with a reasonable understandingbased on the presentations they’vestudied online, on their homework, andon online discussions, faculty need toprovide:
■ engaging instructional materials, ■ online feedback that can help students
get past common stumbling blocks, ■ online feedback that can help students
understand whether they are ready forclass, and
■ online feedback that can help the in-structor understand the students’ stateof preparedness as they arrive inclass.12
Once students arrive in the classroom,the faculty member can help studentsdeal with difficult ideas and nuances andthen can prepare and motivate studentsfor the next round of work away from theclassroom. What kind of classroom spaceis most effective and efficient for this?Ideally, such learning spaces should sup-port several key activities:
■ Students need to be able to hear whatthe faculty member and other stu-dents say and see what other peopleshow, even if objects are small andmany students are in the course.
■ Students need to be able to replay thismaterial, perhaps instantly.
■ Students need to be able to try some-thing someone suggests, then andthere.
■ Students need to be able to work forshort times in small groups, observingand critiquing one another’s work.
■ Students need to be able to respond toquestions, from their peers as well asfrom the instructor.
■ The lecturer needs to be able to displaystudent response patterns and usethem to provoke further discussion.
Large lecture halls that are technology-enabled constitute one way to meet manyof these goals and constraints simultane-ously. But such rooms can be a trap: theycan be inflexible and expensive to re-equip as new technologies appear andthen disappear, and the productivity ofthe investment in the spaces shrinks everymoment they’re left empty, day and night.
In the next few years, a better solutionmay be a distributed classroom. Studentscould meet in face-to-face groups in rela-tively small rooms that are, in turn, net-worked through high-bandwidth inter-c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h t h e i n s t r u c t o r.Researchers at Fraunhofer IPSI’s AMBI-ENTE division call such spaces “coopera-tive buildings.”13 These meeting roomsmight be dozens of feet apart or thou-sands of miles apart. The meeting roomsmight also serve other functions—such asconference rooms, library rooms, or of-fices. These environments combine real-world objects with virtual elements tocreate a whole greater than the sum of itsparts. Students in each room would inter-act with each other and the instructor
50 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
through interactive walls. They couldshare objects on interactive tables, or if afull room of technological affordancesisn’t available, they could simply sit in acommunication chair to participate indi-vidually with the virtual class groups. Theinteractive wall is gesture-based, so thatstudents can move information aroundthe wall or throw and shuffle objects tothe other locations with accompanyingaudio cues.
How would such large, distributedcourses be organized? Large classes andtheir constellations of meeting roomsmight be supported by a single large insti-tution, a state system of institutions, or acoalition of institutions and employers(offering situated learning for interns aswell as regular employees). We predict
that the pioneers of such distributedcourses will be (1) large, research-intensive institutions that want to makebetter use of highly interactive, well-known faculty and (2) coalitions ofsmaller institutions that want to offer adramatic array of courses and lecturers totheir students.
Smaller institutions often have a fewstudents who want a certain upper-division course—but too few to support aface-to-face course. A coalition of suchinstitutions would have plenty of stu-dents to support a whole constellation ofsuch courses, some taught by faculty ateach instititon. This would allow small,isolated institutions to offer some of thecourse and program variety that is nowthe sole province of larger institutions.
Distributed courses are being pilot-tested today. A technologically scaled-down version of this approach is beingused in professional development. Forexample, an organization called LearningTimes facilitates sessions using real-timetools for teachers across New York City.Groups of educational professionals athundreds of sites log in concurrently.They hear from and interact with a re-mote expert/facilitator but then returnintermittently to discuss the topic face toface with people in their own group (or inonline breakout rooms). This contextual-izes the topic to the local school site.Then the expert returns a few minuteslater to debrief, synthesize, and hear fromsome of the sites.14
Although technologies involved in
51July/Augus t 2005� EDUCAUSE r e v i e w
Students need to be able to work for short timesin small groups, observing and critiquing one another’s work.
current “light” pilots are not terribly ex-pensive, they are not yet scalable forlarge-scale implementation. Such larger-scale use may not be far away, however.
Making Technology DisappearFuture classrooms will have the remark-able quality of being both technologicallysophisticated and technologically invisi-ble. The best of future classroom tech-nologies will simply become part of thefabric of an effective classroom environ-ment, unremarkably essential.
Classroom technologies will need tointeroperate in ways that currently existonly in research labs. Devices will need tolink together through shared event sys-tems. Examples are the EventHeap un-derlying the Stanford University iRoomsoftware (http://iwork.stanford.edu/),and its recent commercialized offspringfrom Tidebreak (http://www.tidebreak.com). In operation as a research environ-ment for over four years, the iRoom com-ponents include touch-screen displays,interactive murals, haptic input devices,scanners, and cameras.
Equally important, these new class-room technologies will need to be per-ceived as natural extensions of currentclassrooms, enabling natural inter-actions. A current design goal amongthese futuristic communications envi-ronments is that they be easy to use. Forexample, IBM has a large interactive dis-play, the IBM BlueBoard, to support con-tent sharing among BlueBoard users andeasy access to each user’s network infor-mation. Using RFID tags, a person quicklylogs into the board and communicateswith other online BlueBoard users or getspersonal information tailored to the indi-vidual user’s preferred interaction pro-file. Shared large-scale display interfacessupport particular kinds of collabora-tions, with domain context that is naturalfor each work type. This is the marriage oflarge interactive displays with domain-based content recognition.15
When these technologies were de-ployed, a critical finding is that their use isrelated to their context. When tools likethese were put in hallways to supportspontaneous, ephemeral information ex-
change, they were ignored. Peoplewouldn’t use them because they were tooinvasive. Only when the tools weremoved to more situationally appropriatespaces — designated group meetingrooms, for example—did experimenta-tion and ad hoc use begin.
Research in collaborative computingenvironments has led to general designguidelines that apply directly to futureclassrooms.16 The variety of different, indi-vidually task-specific digital devices willcontinue to increase, making interoper-ability of heterogeneous tools essential.Despite different software versions,brands, and input and output devices, theywill all have to work together. The currentstovepipes of interoperability by manufac-turer or brand must be overcome. Stan-dards movements are gaining momentumbut have a long way to go and need bothcorporate and community support. Thedevices must work in spite of transient net-work outages and changing system com-ponents, without full-time tending by anarmy of trained technologists. Robust de-sign must recover from failures and pre-vent outages. Easy-to-use interfaces makethe use of technologically sophisticatedcollaboration tools cognitively less de-manding. Learning how to use the systemfrom the experiences of others is criticalfor these new classroom technologies to beadopted by a community.
Creating Pioneering Learning SpacesThe previous articles in this issue addressthe design of the learning space (Johnsonand Lomas) and the creation of the learn-ing space (Wedge and Kearns). They pres-ent compelling issues and strategies forassessing and making the complex trade-offs that are required to go from learningtheory to design principles to designprocess and finally to the physical con-struction that realizes the intentions of aclassroom or building design plan.Rather than duplicate their discussions,we offer here three areas for the designplanning team to keep in mind when in-venting pioneering learning spaces: (1)activities and facilities; (2) forms andfunctions; and (3) desired characteristics.
Activities and FacilitiesIn order to invent new kinds of learningspaces, members of the planning team
52 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
need to be able to envision activities andfacilities in a sufficiently vivid way(through visits, videos, descriptions, sup-porting research).17 Such activities and fa-cilities need to be described at two levels:(1) “elemental activities,” that is, the actionsthat people take from moment to moment(e.g., speaking and being heard); and (2)“programmatic activities,” that is, programsof activity (e.g., an engineering studentneeds to repeatedly brainstorm, do engi-neering design, build what has been de-signed, and test what has been built).
In a survey, focus group, or interview,18
faculty and students should be askedabout the relative importance of each ofthe following capabilities of the newlearning space. How important is it thatthe new space
■ enable the use of basic computing/connectivity,
■ enable the learner or the teacher todiscover, import, and display informa-tion easily, including the ability for astudent in a large class to point withinan image, or images, while explaining,“comparing and contrasting,” or ask-ing a question,
■ enable participants to hear and speak,■ enable participants to see one an-
other’s faces,■ enable faculty members to spot pat-
terns in students’ thinking in order toadjust instruction,
■ enable participants to review previousclassroom communication,
■ enable students to talk with one an-other during class sessions,
■ enable a shift from a plenary format tosmall-group work, and back,
■ enable the use of outside experts, ■ enable students to use one another as
learning resources, ■ enable faculty and students to use the
classroom easily, ■ enable participants to interact sponta-
neously, other than through course ac-tivity, and
■ enable participants to store bulky ma-terials during, and between, coursemeetings?
Complementing this set of prioritized ele-mental activities are programmatic priori-ties. As noted earlier, the redesign of the“Aero-Astro” building at MIT is an exam-ple of faculty organizing their thinkingabout space around a rigorous inquiryinto the nature of engineering activity.
But what if the institution wants flexi-ble facilities that serve a wide range offields? What starting place might facilitatethat discussion of pioneering physicaland virtual learning spaces? A good be-ginning can be found in the frameworkfor accountability developed by the Asso-ciation of American Colleges and Univer-
sities, describing the five defining out-comes of a liberal education:
1. Strong analytical, communication,quantitative, and information skills—achieved and demonstrated throughlearning in a range of fields, settings, andmedia and through advanced studies inone or more areas of concentration
2. Deep understanding and hands-onexperience with the inquiry practicesof disciplines that explore the natural,social, and cultural realms—achievedand demonstrated through studiesthat build conceptual knowledge byengaging learners in concepts andmodes of inquiry that are basic to thenatural sciences, social sciences,humanities, and arts
53July/Augus t 2005� EDUCAUSE r e v i e w
The iRoom components include touch-screendisplays, interactive murals, haptic input devices,scanners, and cameras.
3. A proactive sense of responsibility forindividual, civic, and social choices—achieved and demonstrated throughforms of learning that connect knowl-edge, skills, values, and public actionand through reflection on students’own roles and responsibilities in so-cial and civic contexts
4. Intercultural knowledge and col-laborative problem-solving skills—achieved and demonstrated in a variety of collaborative contexts (class-room, community-based, interna-tional, and online) that prepare stu-dents both for democratic citizenshipand for work
5. Habits of mind that foster integrativethinking and the ability to transfers k i l l s a n d k n o w l e d ge f ro m o n e setting to another—achieved anddemonstrated through advanced re-search and/or creative projects inwhich students take the primary re-sponsibility for framing questions,carrying out an analysis, and produc-ing work of substantial complexityand quality19
These defining outcomes are aboutwhat graduates can do, not just about whatthey know. To achieve these outcomes bythe time they graduate, students need tohave spent a good deal of their time com-municating, calculating, inquiring, takingaction in the wider world (e.g., servicelearning), exploring other cultures(sometimes by actually going to otherplaces while staying in touch with theirinstitution and faculty), working in teamswith people from other cultures, andpulling together the strands of what theyhave learned in order to tackle authenticproblems in their fields.
If institutions are to achieve demon-strable gains in these five outcomes, stu-dents and faculty will need their facilitiesto support several fundamental activitiesthat will occupy much of their time:
■ They need space in which to practicesuch activities, alone and in teams.
■ They need space in which to receivecoaching and assessment.
■ They need space in which to acquireknowledge — explanations gained
through some mix of reading, listen-ing, and watching.
To this point, we have analyzed theneed for learning spaces in terms of ele-mental and programmatic activities. Sev-eral other goals and constraints alsoshould be considered in the explorationof new learning spaces. For example,classrooms ought to be at least attractiveenough to make being in them pleasantand rewarding. They may not be Star-bucks, but they shouldn’t be penal cellseither. Better yet, can classrooms create asense of drama as students enter them,meeting after meeting? What characteris-tics of a space could create such excite-ment and anticipation?
Another goal for facilities is connected-ness—that is, a sense of connection to theculture and past of the institution and tothe professions or disciplines understudy. Traditionally, this has beenachieved through posters under glass, orpaintings of professors, or photos of paststudents, or display cases with “do nottouch” student projects. How can class-rooms of the future create a better senseof connection and belonging?
The process of adding value to spacesto enhance both their attractiveness andtheir connectedness is influenced by thecurrent state of technology, in the ab-solute sense and also in how the currentstate-of-the-art is realized on a given cam-pus. At the present time (mid-2005), wefind one way to increase attractivenessand connectedness is the use of large-format digital displays. In the futureclassroom, displays should be largeenough in context to allow the student to“enter” another place—for example, avideo of a past student talking about aproject, a video wall connecting two dis-tant classrooms, a video of an experimentthat will be performed later in class, or adisplay of artifacts that the student canmanipulate and explore.
Families of Forms and FunctionsIt doesn’t make sense to expect everyspace at an institution to support all thekinds of activities and functions de-scribed above. Instead, for both educa-tional and technological reasons, it maymake sense to optimize some facilities forcertain functions. Instead of meeting in
EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 200554
55July/Augus t 2005� EDUCAUSE r e v i e w
the same classroom every time, classesmight move from room to room duringthe term, depending on what students (asa whole class, in small groups, or workingalone) need to do.
A typology for such specialized learn-ing spaces might include the following:
2. Designing spaces (spaces for puttingstructure, order, and context to free-ranging ideas)
3. Presenting spaces (spaces for show-ing things to a group)
4. Collaborating spaces (spaces for en-abling team activities)
5. Debating or negotiating spaces(spaces for facilitating negotiations)
6. Documenting spaces (spaces for de-scribing and informing specific activ-ities, objects, or other actions)
7. Implementing/associating spaces(spaces for bringing together relatedthings needed to accomplish a task orgoal)
8. Practicing spaces (spaces for investi-gating specific disciplines)
9. Sensing spaces (spaces for perva-sively monitoring a location)
10. Operating spaces (spaces for con-trolling systems, tools, and complexenvironments)
Any learning space can be used to sup-port almost any elemental activity, if peo-ple are willing to make enough compro-mises. For example, a seminar room with asmall roundtable can be used by a lecturerwho speaks without interruption totwenty-five students crammed into theroom. But each type of activity can be sup-ported more readily by some learningspaces than by others. Identifying cohe-sive patterns of use and themes in whichthe elemental activities tend to be morecommon will provide some structure toan otherwise chaotic stew of technologies.
Colleges and universities likewise sit
in a broader social context, situated incommunities that demand their servicesand attention. Internal versus externalpressures may pit the needs and require-ments of disciplinary programs againstthe interests and expectations of the townor city in which the institution resides.These demands translate into classroomrequirements that extend beyond the re-quirements of the academy.
And the conflicts facing the classroom
designer don’t stop there. Another prob-lem is that the life-span of various class-room elements age at different rates. Fig-ure 3 juxtaposes a range of buildingcomponents by their relative useful lifeexpectancy. The variation extends by a fac-tor of 30, from software systems (expectedto last approximately one to three years)through furniture (estimated to last ap-proximately fifteen years) to mechanicaland electrical systems (twenty-five years)and finally to the building infrastructureitself (persisting at least fifty years and,more likely, double that or more). To put itanother way, a building designed todaywill change electrical systems once, furni-ture at least twice, and software systems fif-teeen times or more. So what should thebuilding look like when it’s new?
A building designed today will change electricalsystems once, furniture at least twice, andsoftware systems fifteen times or more.
56 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
For these and other reasons, flexibilityis crucial in today’s design. Enrollmentsin particular subjects may increase or de-cline. New fields may appear. New modesof instruction may become popular. De-signers need to walk a tightrope betweenfacilities that are able to support qualita-tive improvements in teaching and learn-ing activities and facilities that are alsoflexible enough to be adapted to chang-ing needs and circumstances.
Characteristics of Future Classrooms A well-designed classroom of the futurewill have the following characteristics:
■ The classroom is designed for people, not forephemeral technologies. This is a commonperspective among today’s architects,but it was lost for many years as tech-nology requirements dominated theinfrastructure. With miniaturization,the design of spaces can refocus onmaking the people —not the ma-chines—comfortable.
■ The classroom is optimized for certain learn-ing activities; it is not just stuffed with technol-ogy. Classrooms, laboratories, or semi-nar rooms make it easier to do certainthings. We intuitively recognize this,but there is less understanding aboutwhat learning activities students needto engage in, master, or at least be ex-
posed to in order to become effectivepractitioners of their discipline.
■ The classroom enables technologies to bebrought to the space, rather than having tech-nologies built into the space. Student-owned devices need to be enabled tosupport students’ academic work.
■ The classroom allows invisible technologyand flexible use. The increasing compu-tational power has diminished theneed to centrally provision this re-source; hence, computer cycles are nolonger a constrained resource. Roomavailability, however, is. Classroomswere built to support industrial mod-els of teaching, making them unusablefor other human pursuits. The class-room of the future will be optimizedfor sets of functions and will be flexi-ble for changing requirements.
■ The classroom emphasizes soft spaces. Theindustrial teaching model has led toover-illumination, hard hallways,fixed-seat classrooms, and hard sur-faces. The rooms are not comfortable.To paraphrase W. C. Fields, they’rehardly fit for man or beast.
■ The classroom is useful across the twenty-four-hour day. Students work during all hoursof the day. This is not just because somestudents have jobs and other nonacade-mic commitments; engaged studentswill approach their work independent
of the clock. Future classrooms shouldsupport students when they are ableand ready to do the work.
■ The classroom is “zoned” for sound and activ-ity. Basic guidelines for multiple-usespaces recognize that different types ofwork have different implications forgroup spaces. Future classrooms payattention to these differences, makingvariegated use more effective.
These characteristics of future class-rooms embody principles that can be usedto periodically review the state of the cam-pus and to determine priorities for incre-mental renovations and larger-scale proj-ects. This kind of formative evaluation andplanning was suggested decades ago, inthe mid-1970s, by Christopher Alexander.He suggested that such a periodic review,using principles developed and approvedby the community, could enable organicgrowth and the emergence of an institu-tion that could support learning in a betterand more coherent way each year.20
ConclusionOur ability to imagine the classroom ofthe future is shaped by changes in ourown beliefs about learning spaces:
■ From focusing on formal education, to emphasizing learning in both for-mal and nonformal settings
■ From seeing college-level learning asbeing primarily about listening, read-ing, and taking notes,to seeing learning as being about situ-ated action, collaboration, coaching,and reflection
■ From assuming that academic workand rewards are neatly divided intocompartments of research, academics,and community engagement,to assuming that learning spaces needto support a mix of all three of thesefunctions
■ From seeing faculty and students as therecipients of new learning spaces de-signed by specialists,
The classroom of the future will be optimized for sets of functions and will be flexible forchanging requirements.
0 10 20 30 40 50+* Effectively indefiniteYears
Bu
ildin
g C
om
po
ne
nts Computer, Communications IT Hardware
Cabling Systems
Furniture and Equipment
Mechanical and Electrical
Software Systems
Building Structures*
Figure 3: Lifetime of Building Components
Source: S. Kelsey, Anshen+Allen, LA, Architects.
to using their dreams of better teach-ing and learning to shape pioneeringnew learning spaces
■ From seeing the design and construc-tion of a building or other learningspace as a fixed goal, unchanging aftercompletion, to envisioning a building as the begin-ning of an evolutionary process in astate of permanent flux and informediterative change
The movie Groundhog Day tells thestory of a man who gradually perfects hislife when he is forced to live the same dayover and over, moving from the surfacefeatures down to the fundamental issuesof character. We live in a fast-changingworld, as different from the world ofGroundhog Day as one can imagine. Andyet, for that reason, the kind of reflectionthat the movie depicts is even more im-portant as we daily plan, create, and uselearning spaces. What is sometimescalled the “scholarship of teaching”—thewidespread involvement by faculty andstudents in a process of inquiry—is an es-sential part of designing and using pio-neering learning spaces. The college oruniversity faculty, staff, and studentsshould periodically ask three questionsabout learning spaces:
1. What are we as a course and as a com-munity doing with the spaces we cur-rently have?
2. How can we use these current spacesmore completely and effectively to teachin the most ideal ways imaginable?
3. How can we improve our learningspaces so that we can organize our teach-ing and learning in even better ways?
As we iteratively approach the class-room of the future, our understanding ofboth learning and technology will im-prove. The goal is not to leverage technol-ogy to make the future classroom ap-proach an ideal learning environment.The goal is to reach beyond that ideal. e
Notes1. See Roger C. Schank, Virtual Learning: A Revolution-
ary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), and Nancy VanNote Chism and Deborah J. Bickford, eds., “TheImportance of Physical Space in Creating Sup-porting Learning Environments,” New Directionsfor Teaching and Learning, vol. 92 (winter 2002): 1.
2. The video series Minds of Our Own (1997) shows in-terviewers questioning seniors on graduation day.Many graduates were unable to apply basic ideasthey had “learned” in courses in which they hadreceived As, in high school and probably again incollege. Minds of Our Own—three one-hour pro-grams on constructivism—was produced by theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicsand is available from Annenberg/CPB (see <http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html>).
3. John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R.Cocking, eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experi-ence and School, Committee on Developments in theScience of Learning, National Research Council(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press,1999), executive summary.
4. Edgar Dale, Audiovisual Methods in Teaching, 3d ed.(New York: Dryden Press, 1969).
5. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, How People Learn,204.
6. For example, capstone courses like MIT’s 2.007,Design and Manufacturing I (see http://pergatory.mit.edu/2.007/). The course has not only pub-lished its content on MIT OpenCourseWare (see<http://ocw.mit.edu>), but the learning toolsthemselves and assistance in implementing themare being disseminated by the MIT iCampus ini-tiative, promoting faculty-to-faculty engagementto implement educational technologies in teach-ing (see MIT iCampus, <http://icampus.mit.edu>).
7. Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson,“Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergrad-uate Education,” AAHE Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 7
(1987). For more on the seven principles and theirrelevance to teaching with technology, see the fol-lowing TLT Group Web site: <http://www.tltgroup.org/seven/home.htm>.
8. For background on the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate curriculum, see “What Is CDIO?,” <http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/cdio/overview.html>, and “Welcome to the CDIO™ Initiative,”<http://www.cdio.org/index.html>.
9. See Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, and DannyCohen, “The Internet of Things,” Scientific Ameri-can, October 2004.
10. Project Kaleidoscope (http://www.pkal.org) hasassembled valuable resources and programsabout the design of spaces that facilitate, nurture,and strengthen learning in the fields of science,technology, engineering, and mathematics. Forlinks to the intersection between learning andphysical space design, see <http://www.pkal.org/template0.cfm?c_id=3>.
11. Richard E. Clark, “Reconsidering Research onLearning from Media,” Review of Educational Re-search, vol. 53, no. 4 (1983); Richard E. Clark, “Con-founding in Educational Computing Research,”Journal of Educational Computing Research, vol. 1, no.2 (1985).
12. For a good book on this pair of feedback func-tions, see Gregor M. Novak et al., Just-in-TimeTeaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Technol-ogy (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).
13. N. A. Streitz, J. Geißler, and T. Holmer, “Room-ware for Cooperative Buildings: Integrated Designof Architectural Spaces and Information Spaces,”in Cooperative Buildings: Integrating Information, Or-ganization, and Architecture, Proceedings of CoBuild’98, Darmstadt, Germany (Heidelberg, Germany:Springer, 1998).
14. Personal communication from Jonathan Finkel-stein, LearningTimes, May 12, 2005.
15. Aaron Adler, Jacob Eisenstein, Michael Oltmans,Lisa Guttentag, and Randall Davis, “Building theDesign Studio of the Future,” in Making Pen-BasedInteraction Intelligent and Natural, Papers from theAAAI Fall Symposium, Arlington, Virginia, Octo-ber 21–24, 2004, <http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/publications/Adler2004Building.pdf>.
16. Daniel M. Russell, Norbert A. Streitz, and TerryWinograd, “Building Disappearing Comput-ers,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 48, no. 3(2005).
17. For one such framework, see The TLT Group’s re-source pages on learning facilities, especially thematerials linked to this taxonomy of learning ac-tivities: <http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/Teach/Smart_Classrooms.htm>.
18. The TLT Group is developing such surveys forsubscribing institutions. For information, contactStephen C. Ehrmann at <[email protected]>.
19. Association of American Colleges and Universi-ties, Our Students’ Best Work: A Framework for Ac-countability Worthy of Our Mission (Washington,D.C.: AAC&U, 2004), <http://www.aacu.org/publications/pdfs/StudentsBestReport.pdf>.
20. Christopher Alexander et al., The Oregon Experi-ment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
58 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w � Ju l y/Augus t 2005
What is sometimes called the “scholarship ofteaching” is an essential part of designing andusing pioneering learning spaces.
