EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Learning Space Design

This is the entire issue of EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 42, Number 1, January/February, 2007.

With directed effort, some ingenuity, and a future-focused vision, colleges and universities should be able to identify and leverage existing technologies with which to build aspects of "future" campus learning spaces—today.

From Diana G. Oblinger, ed., Learning Spaces
As we build the classrooms of the future that facilitate usability, engagement, collaboration, and learning, we would do well to remember what it was about learning environments that enchanted us and commit ourselves to preserving, restoring, and creating those experiences for our own students.

Deep into the digital age, academic libraries have relinquished much of their fundamental and sustaining role. For most people, including academicians, the library—in its most basic function as a source of information—has become overwhelmingly a virtual destination.

"We strive to provide faculty and learners an opportunity to experiment with learning spaces that have been designed with a radical flexibility that encourages them to 'please move the furniture' and that untethers them to the maximum extent possible."

Today's IT leaders can work as alchemists, bringing people, technologies, and learning content together to produce three types of true gold: twenty-first-century hybrid courses, learning spaces, and literacy.

This is the entire issue of EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 40, Number 4, July/August 2005.

A strategic design process that identifies space needs and analyzes possible solutions, functionality, and costs allows campus planning groups and architectural designers to take a fresh look at utilization, collaboration, flexibility, and adaptability to cost-effectively create institutional learning spaces.

By focusing on design principles grounded in deeper learning principles, in what makes successful teaching and learning, a campus can revolutionize the design process to create learning spaces that meet the needs of both faculty and students.

This discussion of the inadequacies of traditional classrooms, of ideas that break with these traditions, and of suggested areas for the design team to keep in mind can help campuses plan pioneering, rather than imitative, learning spaces for the future.