Recently, my friend and futurist, Bryan Alexander posited three scenarios for the coming years of higher education: The Post-Pandemic Campus, Covid Fall, and Toggle Term. In the first scenario the disruptions of this spring rapidly fade into the past with only minor disruptions to future activities. Covid Fall presents a doomsday scenario where both the responses of our institutions and the spread of virus remain beyond control. The third model posits oscillations of viral activity with Covid reappearing spasmodically in time and place and institutions having to react in various ways in response to outbreaks. A savvy planner will hope for the first outcome but will be prepared for the second and third ones. Many universities are beginning to do so. The logistics of running a university or college in this environment are incredibly complex but they only serve the larger goal of learning.

We must therefore not lose sight of the wicked problem of how we might preserve quality (and a measure of equality) within instruction. This is a difficult conversation to have right now because the teaching faculty are deeply submerged in the process of somehow maintaining order out of the chaos that has been produced by the initial wave of the virus.As I have written about before, our instructional choices are bound within a system of constraints ranging from institutional and disciplinary requirements to student expectations. These systemic constraints have by and large not changed. Meeting them, however, has become exponentially harder. Students are already refusing to pay the high cost of education for what they see as a diminished experience. Faculty are struggling to make sense of the realities of the new teaching environments they are now constrained by. Above this hangs the ominous question of whether it is even possible to meet these often-contradictory forces in a pandemic environment.

The answer to this is clearly “yes” but in order to get there we are going to have to do a root-and-branch deconstruction and analysis of how we envision instructional modules and the toolsets that we use to execute them. Some are beginning to discuss classes of shorter duration of either four or five-week duration to make schedules more nimble. This is a good strategy for dealing with oscillating and somewhat unpredictable waves of closures as predicted by Alexander’s Toggle Term scenario, in my opinion the most likely scenario in 2020-2022. However, even with that in place you cannot rule out mid-term disruptions. This strategy also doesn’t address the Covid Fall scenario where the very systems of higher education may be put under existential threat. We do not want to find ourselves there even if the virus proves extremely persistent and severe.

We must consider a set of antifragile pedagogical strategies and approaches within the classroom that are supported by instructional frameworks that help set student expectations. I have argued before that hybrid instruction is the shape of the future. I would add to that argument that the distinction between “in-person” and “online” is increasingly anachronistic. Instead, courses should be identified as having “synchronous” vs. “asynchronous” requirements. Some courses, such as workforce or science labs will require significant synchronous capabilities. These courses have perhaps been the most disrupted by the current crisis.

Moreover, we should not lose sight of the conversational frameworks, as defined by Diana Laurillard that underlie all forms of learning. These frameworks are particularly important to the less-skilled learners that make up a significant proportion of our undergraduate populations. Formative assessment and active learning are essential to their success and deeply impact the qualitative experience of even the most skilled learners. Many of Laurillard’s “conversations” require a measure of synchronous instruction and its capacity for immediate feedback. Synchronous experiences are essential in adding depth to any instructional experience no matter the skill of the learner in question.

How do we continue to create these kinds of rich, and in some cases essential, experiences? We need to consider every aspect of our classes as a set of tools that support both synchronous and asynchronous learning. Most content can be delivered asynchronously in various forms. Applying, analyzing, and putting into practice that content, however, may, in many cases require some form of synchronous interaction between the student and teacher (including librarians, mentors, counselors, tutors, and other support personnel) or between the student and his or her peers in order to achieve meaningful learning experiences.

One of the effects of the pandemic has been to drastically limit the size of gatherings. Serendipitously, meaningful interactions are more likely to occur in small groups rather than in 500-person lecture halls. One strategy would therefore be to assemble a group of tools that would allow institutions to carry out in-person, synchronous instruction in groups of no more than about a dozen people complemented by online delivery of content. Putting a dozen students in a classroom designed for 30+ should allow for social distancing requirements. Hybrid toolsets could be used to stretch the capacities of physical facilities operating at vastly reduced capacity. It also is far easier to develop communities of practice that are closely associated with accelerating learning processes. Having this kind of community will make the learning experience far more antifragile if the course is suddenly moved online.

Nimbleness is in large part conditioned by size. With proper planning and support, learning in smaller chunks coupled with creating meaningful communities of practice will cushion the effects of periodic shocks to our physical environments, while potentially even increasing the meaningfulness of the experience. It’s time to double down on quality, not give up on it. If there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is that those communities with stores of human and social capital have proven to be the most resilient. Now is the time for us to look at what makes learning most human and build our educational communities round them. We must never forget that we are in the business of building humans.

As the current crisis unfolds, I have been involved in many conversations with faculty and administrators about moving classes online. These conversations rapidly devolve into discussions of the relative merits of various tools. Often these discussions resemble office workers debating the relative merits of various plows. They are disconnected from the reality of what was already happening in peoples’ classrooms before social isolation took hold. When I start to ask questions about the intent of specific instructional activities such as lectures, assessment, or discussion is I am quickly shut down because “no one wants to talk about philosophy now.” However, now is precisely the time when we should be talking about philosophy because it is only when we strip the processes that occur in our learning environments bare that we can grasp at the correct tools for both us as teachers and, more importantly, for the learners that depend on us.

In a nutshell, good teachers listen as much as they talk. Diana Laurillard refers to these as “conversational spaces.”(Laurillard, Diana, 2003, 2007, 2009) Teachers right now need to find tools that enable them to listen and hear because this is what distance robs us of. If the tool is too top-down your students won’t be empowered to talk. If it is too technically difficult the means of hearing will break down. This is the single most important challenge facing us right now. A good conferencing tool that flattens both the technical and communications curves is the essential tool right now not because of what it is but because of what it does. Function should always trump form.

The part of instruction that we are changing the most is the physical interactions within the classroom. Therefore it is important to take an honest look at what goes on in a stereotypical classroom. Faculty talk at their students. Much of that is misheard or ignored. Better students take notes of information. Often that information is lacking in context, especially if they are simply copying from a whiteboard or PowerPoint slide. In some classes communication doesn’t go much further than that. Students may ask for some points of clarification (many don’t) and try to make sense out of the information coming at them but that’s about the extent of the conversation going on. This is fairly easy to replicate online. Just post notes or PowerPoints slides. Answer questions via email or chat and you’re pretty much done. Because of technical challenges and tool limitations there are a lot of online courses that never go much further than this essential modality.

Those faculty who think deeply about what’s going on in the classroom environment realize that this is far from sufficient. One step further would to engage in the Socratic method with extensive questioning and feedback about student attention and mental engagement within the class. Socratic method is much harder to replicate online because much of its essential feedback is dependent on live, synchronous interactions with students. Watching a video of a Socratic interchange would merely form a more confusing version of a straight lecture paradigm and, arguably, would be more confusing for those not present synchronously. Also, the element of body language and performance inherent in this method is inevitably muted, if not lost entirely, online. There are a number of tools available to facilitate this kind of instruction such as clickers and other electronic feedback mechanisms. None of them, however, overcome the kind of “social distancing” that limit the execution of this approach remotely. Also, it’s a lot easier to hide in the back of the online “classroom” and be “present” without being mentally present in the discussion.

Many tools in the learning management system are designed to facilitate these kinds of instruction. They imply a power structure where the instructor is at the front and the class should follow along as best as they can. Some tools may be useful for making that path easier but the basic communications modality is the same. The more you go down this path, the more complex the tools become. Communication should not be complex. It is a fragile flower, easily broken. Moving thousands of classes online in a time of stress for both instructor and student risks a lot of breakage.

Another approach would be to back off and consider how effective communication occurs between faculty and instructor. For one thing, I walk around the classroom instead of positioning myself in the front. This is basic technique for making sure even those students who are trying to hide will not be able to do as we engage in class discussion. Conversation cannot be replicated in a series of disconnected posts on a discussion board. It is a dynamic interchange which the instructor steers but does not always control. The controlling factor is the students’ capacity to absorb information flows in the classroom, not how much material I have to get through. Adjustments are made. Putting information online has the advantage of persistence but we completely lose the conversational aspect so critical for the learning process, particularly among students who lack the skills to teach themselves. Start here.

We are fortunate at this technological junction to have relatively sophisticated videoconferencing capabilities to complement whatever asynchronous capabilities we have developed online. Live conversations offer the only way to achieve immediate feedback and conversation. Set up properly, they can also bring the student to the fore. The best platforms are also technically easy to navigate because they were designed to be used by nontechnical business users on a regular basis. They also flatten interactions if they are designed for collaboration over presentation/lecture. In an environment where the vast majority of faculty and students have never operated in this way before, this is an obvious tool to grasp for. It most closely mirrors interactions on the classroom level. It requires minimal setup and adaptation from what is going on in the classroom and can work to flatten the distance between teacher and student when distance will be the biggest challenge to overcome. Focusing on other tools risks creating lots of noise in a confusing environment, not the best strategy for communication.

Right now, everyone is floating in an atomized soup. Regular bearings are lost in the fog of uncertainty but are coupled with a desire to move forward beyond the immediate crisis. Finding our way back to the basics of what we’ve always tried to do in the classroom and matching the appropriate tools with the task is critical to the success of that effort. If anything, there are too many tools available to us in this environment. This can be overwhelming. Best to keep it simple, go and grab your favorite hammer or screwdriver, and see if it will do the job in front of you. Don’t worry about the rest. Above all, listen to your students. They need to hear your voice clearly now more than ever and you need to hear theirs in order to be understood. That much will never change.

You have just been through 8 hours of unremitting stress flying your bomber over Germany, being shot at, and just keeping your plane in the air. As you approach your airfield in Southern England, you pull the lever to lower your landing gear and listen for the satisfying chirp of rubber on the runway that indicates you are home. Instead, your senses are greeted with a rending crash as your bomber careens over the asphalt runway. Your belly gunner is probably dead and your plane is a wreck. The problem? The knob that lowers your flaps is right next to that which raises your landing gear. Instead of slowing your speed and increasing the lift of your wings the nearly identical knob has raised your landing gear. (https://bit.ly/2UdHpT5)

As Covid-19 shuts down in-person instruction across education, we are faced with a similar situation trying to land our classes in a time of crisis. We must take the time to grasp at the right levers and to design systems so that our students aren’t forced to suffer the consequences of our mistakes, which must surely come. Learning is antifragile. Many of the systems designed around it are not.

We often overlook how broadly design impacts our lives. As Don Norman points out, “All artificial things are designed.” (Norman, Don, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2013, p. 4). It impacts every level of the teaching and learning experience. Design touches the layout of our classrooms, the digital tools we use, and the very nature of semesters, class sessions, and curriculum. All of these are being tested right now (except for maybe classroom design). In order to begin any design process, no matter how rushed, we must first understand the goals and constraints of what we are trying to do. For instance, the government has declared gatherings over 10 people inadvisable due to the pandemic. It is mid-semester. Go.

As we ask thousands of instructors and millions of students to go online with little or no preparation, we will see lots and lots of crash landings as all grasp for unfamiliar tools and struggle to survive in poorly designed systems struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances on the ground. There are many levels of intertwingled systems where poor design can fail us.

Image ©2011 Tom Haymes. Some rights reserved.

At the highest level we run up against is the systemic construct that we call the semester/credit-hour/contact hour class. These are designed realities. “Services, lectures, rules and procedures, and the organizational rules of businesses and governments do not have physical mechanisms, but their rules of operation have to be designed, sometimes informally, sometimes precisely recorded and specified.” (Norman, ibid) In other words, we have to ask ourselves fundamental design questions that underlie many of these kinds of realities. There is pressure to keep the larger system intact and, as a result, there are many systemic factors that prevent us from simply blowing the “traditional” academic structure up. Instead of addressing the systemic paradigm, the initial reaction is to lean on technology to simply move all “instruction online.” The systemic design paradigm hasn’t been challenged at this level at most institutions.

This decision has consequences in that it shifts the burden of design from the administrators to the faculty who now have to deal with a new set of constraints in the design of how they interact with their students. Keeping this at the institutional systemic level for a moment, a second option might have been to pause the semester and extend it into the summer. There are other cascading impacts from that kind of decision but it might have done a better job of preserving academic quality but at the risk of sacrificing enrollments and revenue. It is interesting to note that in England in the plague year of 1665, pausing instruction is precisely what Cambridge elected to do, admittedly under very different economic circumstances.

Putting the burden of adjustment on the instructor is in itself a design decision. It will reshape the parameters and constraints of those struggling with classroom organization in a radically reshaped world. On a classroom level, faculty must consider the systems of learning they are setting up for their students and how these might be disrupted by a shift of modality and related tools for learning. What used to occur as a casual conversation within the class or outside the class must now be intermediated by technology. This technology will inevitably introduce a barrier to communication. Physical meetings also impose barriers in that they involve putting people together in the same place at the same time but these are design challenges we implicitly manage.

All instruction is a form of conversation (Laurillard, Diana, 2003, 2007, 2009). First, as mentioned, there are direct conversations between the teacher and the student, among the students (peers), and between the student and the teacher. Then there are indirect conversations, usually taking the form of assessments. These can also be interactions between students and teachers as well as peers. They require rapid feedback to the learner. Finally, there is the preservation of active learning, which involves immediate, internal feedback to the student. In other words, a conversation that the learner has with his or herself.

Moving instruction online carries with it at least two dangers to these paths of communication, particularly in a time of social isolation. First of all, the isolation itself must be considered and acknowledged. Online learning, as it is usually designed, is often a solitary process. Impersonal bulletin boards are, in the words of Frank Zappa, “lonely person devices,” often with little or no incentive to participate unless compelled to do so by extrinsic motivators. As I once said to an instructor in the early days of Facebook as he was considering using it for his class, “no one wants to go to a cocktail party with their parents.” Don’t expect our students to rush to primitive communication devices like discussion boards.

Related to this problem, and the second big issue, is the lack of informal learning in most Learning Management Systems. When I say, “informal” learning, I mean spaces that allow students to informally congregate with one another without the intervention of teachers. Peer conversations such as study groups can form in these spaces. More importantly, they may give isolated students (aka, people) the ability to socialize in a society practicing social distancing. Consider how this might be accomplished online. Does your videoconferencing tool give students the ability to form their own groups? Could this reach beyond the traditional course shell to encompass other sections or even other disciplines? Done correctly, this could encourage students to spend more of their online time with each other rather than random strangers in Snapchat.

In addition to space-time issues, technology itself can introduce unfamiliar barriers to student access for both the student and the teacher/designer. In a 2018 article, researchers at the University of Indiana concluded that technological barriers are not evenly distributed throughout our student bodies. In a study of Indiana students researchers discovered that “roughly 20% of respondents had difficulty maintaining access to technology (e.g., broken hardware, data limits, connectivity problems, etc.). Students of lower socio- economic status and students of color disproportionately experienced hardships, and reliance on poorly functioning laptops was associated with lower grade point averages.” And so we have another set of unexpected variables to our design challenge.

These factors are not revelations for faculty who have been working in the distance learning space for decades now. However, even they have been working with a largely self-selected group of students who meet certain technological requirements in most cases (although some depend on campus computing environments for their access so that will be an issue here as well). It is a lot to expect novice online instructors to rise to the level of technical and social design that better online instructors have achieved. To predicate your systemic design assumptions on that assumption is likely to break the system.

Instead, faculty must be directed toward tools that most closely resemble activities within a physical meeting, and which have the lowest possible barriers to entry. Videoconferencing is an obvious solution, but it carries with it at least one caveat: remember that some students may not have access to a computer with a camera or reliable broadband as the Indiana study seems to indicate. Also remember that that the study looked at students at a 4-year institution. Students at community colleges, at least in my anecdotal experience, are more likely to be concentrated within that lower 20% who have unreliable technological assets at their disposal, especially in poorer communities. Therefore, any videoconferencing platform used must have the option to call into the system using an ordinary phone that is not dependent on a data plan to operate. Students are also under a lot of stress right now. Connecting to their classes should not become one of them.

The challenge of informal learning is harder to overcome. Ideally, the videoconferencing systems offered to the students should allow them to form their own meetings as easily as instructor-led meetings. This functionality should be stressed to them. I don’t know how this will play out. On the one hand, less-prepared students, like the aforementioned community college students or younger students in K12, do not always understand the advantage of working with their peers to overcome their learning challenges and may resist congregating in the online space as a consequence, On the other hand, the level of isolation that is occurring right now might encourage students to spontaneously form groups. This will be an interesting social experiment.

Faculty also need to be mindful of what they are trying to do in other areas of the course, such as assessment. Many of the problems and concerns I’m seeing right now amongst the faculty have to do with trying to directly transfer what seems to work for them in a classroom into an online environment. Assessment design has, of course, come to the fore as faculty worry about compromising the integrity of tests online. The important thing to remember here is that tests are just one form of assessment and are also a designed reality that can be changed in a digital environment. Faculty need to take a moment to assess (pun intended) the outcomes they are trying to measure, not just in content but also in the skills necessary to process content, and ask themselves if they can achieve a higher-order outcome by shifting the nature of their assessment to a different level.

I require my students to produce a final portfolio that measures their ability to process and communicate information about government. I am less concerned about the comprehensiveness of their content mastery in my government class than I am in their ability to be able to find relevant information, analyze it, and use it to advocate for an issue that matters to them. This is also a design choice. As this website is their own creation and on their choice of platform, it also creates opportunities for active learning as we work together to improve what they are trying to say, how they are trying to say it, and how this is ultimately presented. It is a lasting artifact of their work in the class. It is also a form of assessment.

We are bending instruction. When things are bent, basic functions of their design come to the fore. Is what is being bent flexible or is it brittle? Can it be adapted into another form and how does that change its form or efficacy of purpose? By looking at it differently, can we see new opportunities for its use? While learning is a process, how we get there is fundamentally a function of design. This logic applies to the modalities we apply to the communication, assessment, and scope of learning in our classes. The good news is that we have a vast new range of digital tools that create design possibilities in and for our classes and this gives us many new tools to use as we navigate the difficult process of learning with our students. Understanding their basic functionalities and how they fit into the overall system of what we are trying to do is going to be key to adapting teaching and learning to our profoundly reshaped social world.

I was the design team leader for the West Houston Institute and was responsible for integrating and getting many of the design innovations  through the construction phase. Many of the IDEASPACES concepts were integrated into planning and thinking about this building and its planned associated programs. This building was a Finalist in the SXSWedu Learn By Design competition for 2018. This series of articles was originally published on the PBK Architects Insights page in the Fall of 2017.

These spaces are designed to support a wide range of programs including design, innovation, entrepreneurship, digital and media literacy, engineering, as well as “traditional” classes taught by faculty innovators. All of the spaces are designed to be as flexible as possible in order to accommodate programs that will emerge from technological change.

Content Sections:

The West Houston Institute: Designing for Design 

The West Houston Institute: Designing for Collaboration 

The West Houston Institute: Rethinking the Classroom

Designing for Design

In the spring of 2018, Houston Community College (HCC) opened the West Houston Institute, an innovative campus designed to facilitate design in all of its forms. This 100,000 square foot building incorporates a MakerSpace, a Digital Media Center, experiential science labs, a teaching innovation lab, a conference center, and a wide range of collaborative spaces. Most importantly these spaces were designed to mindfully grow and work together. The WHI is explicitly designed to facilitate the design process and will incorporate important programs developed to facilitate the interdisciplinary aspect of design.

A central facet to the building is its MakerSpace, which reflects the overall design philosophy of the Institute itself. It is a space created to be open to as wide a range of users as possible. The design team toured a range of MakerSpaces in order to find an approach that supported artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and the local community of Makers. The space is paired with a lapidary and ceramics studio and the Digital Media Center in order to appeal to any kind of student interested in actualizing creative ideas.

 

The first floor of the West Houston Institute –
the upper floors house additional classroom spaces and offices.

The MakerSpace was intentionally designed to be open to the rest of the building through extensive use of glass. The intent here was to create interest from the casual passerby. HCC found through its prototype MakerSpace that students and other members of the learning community seeing what was going on in the space led to curiosity and a desire to get involved in interesting and unusual activities taking place there. This is also in keeping with the overall design philosophy of bringing together a diverse set of people and interests to create a “Medici Effect” and spur innovation throughout the Institute.

The West Houston Institute MakerSpace with the Main Assembly space to the left and the Commons/Digital Media Center to the right through the window.

Immediately adjacent to the MakerSpace is the Digital Media Center, which is intended to support the creation of digital artifacts in the way that the MakerSpace supports the creation of physical artifacts. The Digital Media Center contains a One Button Studio, an audio recording booth, a digital projects computer lab and staff who can help both faculty and students to create multimedia content. Through past experience and piloting of spaces, HCC has discovered that this digital content has been used for a wide range of uses, including pitching entrepreneurial projects birthed in the MakerSpace.

At the other end of the building are advanced experiential science labs and classrooms designed to create an explicit connection between science and creative pursuits. Experimentation using the Scientific Method should form a core to all design and entrepreneurial projects. Like the MakerSpace, the science labs at the WHI are designed to be experienced by a broad range of students, not just those specifically studying science and engineering. The advanced science lab is being set up to carry out actual undergraduate research through the eventual installation of a Scanning Electron Microscope, an X-Ray Diffraction Device, and an Atomic Force Microscope. Activities in this lab will be ported out to video displays in the hallway. Science students will also be encouraged to collaborate with activities taking place in the MakerSpace and elsewhere throughout the campus.

Connecting all of these spaces are a range of collaborative spaces. At the largest end is a conference center that is the building’s connection to the outside world. It will host events that showcase the work of students and faculty created within the Institute as well as bring in outside thinkers who will inform and inspire the community of innovation and learning that we see emerging from the WHI. Adjacent to the conference center is the Collaboratorium, a facilitated collaboration area. Between these spaces and the MakerSpace/Digital Media Center is a range of informal collaborative spaces designed to give students many venues for informal interactivity.

What will emerge from the WHI is unknown. Unlike other design projects it was always designed to be a work in progress. All spaces within the building are designed around maximum adaptability as new roles and needs emerge. In the words of Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and numerous books on architecture and design, “An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion.” The team recognized early on that many of the technologies that were being designed into the building were at risk of being obsolete before the doors were even opened. Therefore, an explicit decision was made to design the building to change over time. Classrooms were built with extra space to allow for them to be adapted as teaching methods change or even to be converted to project spaces in support of efforts in the MakerSpace and elsewhere.

The MakerSpace and other technology spaces were designed to capacity rather than around a specific technology set. The roof in the MakerSpace is completely open to the deck. Power and network can be easily moved around to support new devices as they are installed. It is possible to cut additional ventilation into the roof structure should that become necessary.

At the end of the day, this building is designed to support humans and human creativity. The need for collaboration will not change even if the tools available to facilitate it do. In this way the building can be explicitly seen as a tool in the facilitation of human interactivity. The MakerSpace is a tool set designed to bring people together. So is the Digital Media Center. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, defines design as, “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” In this way the West Houston Institute was designed with design in mind.

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Designing for Collaboration

The West Houston Institute was explicitly designed with collaboration in mind. This extends from the MakerSpace, which is as much as a collaboration space as it is a technology space, to the Collaboratorium, which is a facilitated brainstorming space, to a host of informal spaces in between. As Frans Johansson writes in The Medici Effect, “Breakthroughs are a result of different people from different fields coming together to find a place for their ideas to meet, collide, and build on each other.” This insight explicitly informed our design for the Institute. We wanted to create a range of spaces where diverse groups of people could come together and interact in both formal and informal venues.

Informal Collaboration in the
West Houston Institute’s Collaboratorium
(Photo: Laura Williamson)

 

In order to promote the interaction of people and their ideas, we looked to Google’s attempts to maintain an innovation culture through spaces explicitly designed to facilitate creative interactions.

Google knows that knowledge can only really spill over if there is a surface – like a chalkboard – on which it can land. If two people run into each other in a hallway and spark a conversation that requires technical discussion, or idea generation, or any topic that might benefit from being written down, it is best if they can write it down then and there. Since hallways are not conducive to stopping to write, Google offices are strewn with “every conceivable gathering space, from large open spaces to tiny nooks with whimsical furniture.” Conversations never take place too far from a space to gather. –  ArchDaily.

One of the early design stipulations we made was that there would be no hallways in the building. We managed to hold to this idea on the first floor and also allowed for significant collaboration areas on the second and third floor. The areas in light green on the diagram below illustrate all of the informal collaboration spaces. They range from small, even individual, areas at the top left of the floor plan to the large conference space at the bottom right. The spaces in between include a wide range of furniture that can be deployed as pods, collaboration tables that include televisions and computer hookups, as well as computing resources scattered throughout the common areas. There are also plans for mobile whiteboards to be scattered throughout the areas to create spontaneous work surfaces for the students and the WHI community to use on the fly. Additional informal collaboration spaces can be found on the upper floors to allow similar spontaneous collaboration to occur.

 

MakerSpaces are typically thought of as technology spaces. This is an inaccurate view of what makes them work properly. They are actually collaboration spaces deploying advanced technologies. These are strategically combined to facilitate the realization of ideas into physical objects such as prototypes. At the WHI, the MakerSpace large assembly space is an open work environment where projects can be built individually or collectively. The idea is for ideas and solutions to spill over throughout the space and for entrepreneurs, artists, engineers, and others to come together in developing solutions for real projects. All the while they will be learning from each other.

The Collaboratorium is a facilitated brainstorming environment. Groups of up to 32 can gather here for day-long programs utilizing design thinking, creative problem solving and other techniques to attack wicked problems. They start in the large Convergent space at the south end of the area, and deconstruct the issue being discussed into smaller bits. Larger groups can then break up into smaller Divergent areas to attack individual parts of the issue. Finally, at the end of the process they reconvene in the Convergent areas to reassemble the individual solutions. This process can be supported by a cloud-based collaboration environment that allows groups to work apart and yet have all of their solutions added to a central canvas, which can be accessed and modified (if that is desired) even after the in-person session ends.

The WHI Conference Space (Photo: Laura Williamson)

 

The Conference Center is designed to be a way for the WHI to collaborate with the outside world. Outside speakers will bring their knowledge to the Institute. Institute participants will be able to share their achievements and insights with the outside world. Finally, the community will have a space to interact through MakerFaires, robotics and other STEM competitions. In this way the conference center acts as a conduit for ideas to flow into and out of the West Houston Institute.

As Steven Johnson writes, “it’s very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world.” The Institute is designed to give diverse groups of people the opportunity to work and learn together to change the world. As such, it was built from the ground up to be a space designed to facilitate a wide range of collaboration activities. Collaboration is a profoundly human activity and it is through our human-centered design philosophy that we have designed a space that is fundamentally human in scope with creativity as a goal.

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Rethinking the Classroom

Houston Community College’s Northwest College has a long history of rethinking how the classroom environment should work. Starting in 2004 the HCC Team, led by Professor of English, Michael Ronan, started piloting next generation learning spaces at its Katy Campus. Faculty were deeply involved in this process, which is logical, as the classroom is, ultimately, their stage and their tool for teaching. Complementing this effort, Technology Director Tom Haymes (now PBK’s Director of Learning and Innovation), also a former faculty member, worked to refine the technology systems in these advanced classrooms. He documented the larger process used to refine classroom technology systems in a series of blogs for the New Media Consortium entitled “99% Invisible.”

• 99% Invisible: Technology, Design, and Communication
• 99% Invisible Part II: The Essence of Good Design
• 99% Invisible Part III: The Goldilocks Zone
• 99% Invisible Part IV: A Holistic Approach to Learning Space Design

We applied all of these lessons in our design of the West Houston Institute classrooms. One of the challenges we faced was uncertainty about the future of teaching. We have been talking for over a decade about the demise of the Sage on the Stage and the lecture method. However, many faculty are very used to teaching this way and requiring them to make radical departures from what they are used to has often resulted in failure.

Instead, classrooms have to be adaptable to shifting teaching styles, while still encouraging faculty to adapt to the new realities of teaching. We have implemented two different kinds of classrooms at the WHI. Both are designed to encourage active learning but can be adapted to wide range of uses. Furthermore, we’ve designed science labs based on the results of the active learning INSPIRE program the college implemented.

The first inclination of the team was to create a classroom with maximum flexibility in mind. This resulted in a classroom subsequently dubbed, “Flexspace.” We experimented with multiple shapes and sizes of tables and chairs. We found that trapezoidal tables offered the most flexibility of setup in this kind of space. However, earlier experiments in one of our Katy Campus pilots found that initial tables were too small and created a risk of tipping. They also lacked wheels.

Katy Learning space Pilot – note the trapezoidal tables at the bottom. In form they worked great but in practice they proved to be too small (and did not roll).

The design implemented at the Alief Campus and replicated at the West Houston Institute was far more successful. The room, at almost 1000 square feet for 32 students, offered ample space to reconfigure the environment as necessary with a minimum of time and effort. Faculty will generally therefore avoid rearranging a room if it presents a serious time investment, because class time is so precious. Ease of use is therefore critical to all furniture and technology solutions. The team knew it was on the right track when we witnessed an English professor reconfigure the pilot room at the Alief campus no less than 3 times.

The Alief FlexSpace Room (Photo: HCC)

A key advantage of this kind of space is that it allows the teacher to reconfigure the classroom into whatever modality that is required in service of pedagogy. The English professor had the tables in rows for his introductory lecture, reconfigured into small groups to allow for brainstorming to occur, and then into a large conference room format so that the students could present and discuss the efforts of their group work. Mobile furniture therefore helps create a very dynamic teaching environment.

The Active Learning Classroom at the HCC’s Alief Campus

The second kind of room is designed to force collaborative activity. The Active Learning Classroom was developed by MIT, the University of North Carolina, and most recently deployed at the University of Minnesota. The ALC is designed around technology pods that allow students to beam their work onto one of five televisions in the room. Each pod contains room for 9 students. This number was found by the other institutions to be ideal in maintaining a viable group over the course of the semester. The rooms at HCC were designed with four pods and can accommodate up to 36 students. The teacher can control all five screens in the room from a central technology station. He or she can put content from the teaching screen on all of the screens or promote any of the pod screens on all screens in the room.

A Collaboration Pod in use in the Alief Campus Active Learning Classroom

This room is designed to create a flat teaching environment and bring collaboration to the fore. It has been demonstrated that it promotes active and peer learning through its very design. This room is designed with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in mind and the system allows for connections from iOS and Android devices. Mobile devices feature a much longer battery life, decreasing the need for plugs at the tables. It may be possible to eliminate the technology pods in future designs and combine the best features of the FlexSpace (mobile furniture) with the best features of the ALC (technology integration). The intent is to start testing this combination in the West Houston Institute rooms.

The primary disadvantage of the ALC is that it requires an immediate change in teaching strategy. This, at a minimum, requires professional development and it limits the number of faculty able to meaningfully use the space.

All of these classroom changes require a significant investment in the human capital of the Institute. As part of this program, therefore, HCC is launching the Teaching Innovation Lab, which is a cohort-based program designed to develop innovative teaching strategies to best use these kinds of spaces. Part of the goal is to integrate learning space and teaching strategies that can be used to develop Next Generation solutions at other institutions.

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