Society for College and University Planning
Community College Planning Sessions at SCUP-46
Best Practices: Planning Effectively Designed Learning Spaces
How do we design learning spaces that enhance the environment for teaching and learning? Should learning spaces be designed to incorporate learner-centered pedagogies? Accommodate a wide range of teaching activities? Facilitate student engagement? Allow seamless integration of technology and media, and support formal and informal learning? Professional literature reveals a wealth of best practices for institutions to plan effectively designed learning spaces. Gain insight, find examples, share your experiences, and take away practical strategies for learning-space design.
Learning Outcomes:
- Recognize how learning spaces can enhance the environment for teaching and learning.
- Explain how best practice planning strategies are undertaken and their value to the intended project.
- Compare planning approaches and consider incorporating examples from peer institutions into your own planning processes.
- Develop insight of a wide range of approaches for learning space design.
TAGS: Learning Space Design, Student Learning, Technology
Skyrocketing enrollment at community colleges across the country impelled them to promote a wide range of student goals and diverse learning objectives. These learning centers no longer function as isolated compounds. As urban living evolves, community colleges are integrating into the local fabric to better serve the community and become centers for 24/7 mixed-use lifestyles. Expanding activities, they are sharing important amenities, such as libraries and childcare, and serving as positive models for diversity and sustainable living.
Learning Outcomes:
- Recognize how community colleges promote urban density, health, safety, and sustainability.
- Investigate models that integrate college facilities into neighborhoods.
- Assess how community colleges improve community engagement.
- Value community colleges as contributors to vital urban centers.
TAGS: Community College, Town/Gown, Master Planning, Adaptation/Redevelopment
Integrated Planning: Can It Really Be Achieved?
Integrated planning has gained popularity as a concept. A comprehensive, collaborative approach, integrated planning includes strategic, facilities, academic, and personnel planning that promotes institutional viability. While this is the desired outcome, real attainment is often more elusive. In practice, integrated planning often falls short due to deficiencies in the planning process. Factors that hinder the integration of planning include: placement of planners in the organizational structure, skill set of planners, and appreciation of an institution’s past, present, and future.
Learning Outcomes:
- Investigate the current state and potential growth of integrated planning in higher education.
- Identify the skill set a planner needs to effectively develop and manage an integrated planning process in higher education.
- Support the importance of proper alignment in the organizational structure of those responsible for integrated planning.
- Determine the factors that limit the effectiveness and realization of integrated planning.
TAGS: integrated planning, Community College, Public College, Strategic Planning
Leveraging Data in Integrated Strategic Planning
By utilizing data and an integrated approach to strategic planning, Pima Community College developed a new, fully-integrated 2011–2013 plan. Draft initiatives address diverse issues across the large, multi-campus college, including student success, leveraging physical resources, and the findings of a recent self-study visit. We will provide an overview of the planning process, the use of data to support planning, linkages with reaccreditation, and how the discussions impacted the new plan.
Learning Outcomes:
- Investigate ways data can identify critical areas that need to be incorporated into a strategic plan.
- Link integrated planning with the reaccreditation process.
- Utilize technology to facilitate data analysis and to present results to diverse planning communities.
- Identify evaluation approaches that measure the effectiveness of strategic plan activities.
TAGS: Strategic Planning, Accreditation, Community College, Multi-campus Planning, integrated planning, Planning Data
Modernizing Greenfield Community College to Serve an Evolving Population
Community colleges are being sought out by an increasingly diverse, growing population. Explore the process Greenfield Community College used to align the repurposing of its 40-year-old facility with the college's evolving mission to better serve its students and community in Franklin County–Massachusetts's poorest. We will evaluate the effectiveness of integrating technology, the arts, and environmental awareness into the daily experience of the student body by replanning the core of the college campus.
Learning Outcomes:
- Describe the evolving role of the community college and the different ways this institution serve its population based on its respective state's educational structure.
- Investigate how a focus on the student experience can align a significant facilities modernization with the institutional mission.
- Discuss issues of universal access and their impact on the physical planning and renovation of a campus facility.
- Analyze cost-effective sustainable strategies that also support a college's educational mission.
TAGS: Community College, Renovation, Mission/Identify/Vision
Partnerships for Growth in Facilities and Programs
As their role rapidly expands, innovative community colleges are learning to utilize partnerships with private development entities, the local business community, other public agencies, and non-profits to deliver the campus facilities needed to accommodate growth and the changing educational landscape. Additionally, these partnerships efficiently maintain and grow programs while saving cost. Learn how Northwest Arkansas Community College pursues and utilizes partnerships to implement its main campus master plan and planned expansion through a new satellite campus.
Learning Outcomes:
- Define different types of partnerships, such as public-private, interagency, and nonprofit, and assess how they can be utilized to deliver facilities.
- Value synergistic partnerships that augment program provision and supply efficiencies.
- Explain the process for identifying partnership potential and forging partnerships.
- Prepare a strategy to pursue partnerships with your institution.
TAGS: Community College, Public/Private Partnerships, Town/Gown, Master Planning, New Campus
This case study from the Kentucky Community and Technical College System will address their process used for funding allocations based on the strategic vision of the system president. Gain their historical context and explore the effectiveness of their communication methods and tools utilized in the process. By viewing this institution's effective methods for allocating scarce resources, perhaps you will glean some portion of the methodology that may work at your institution.
Learning Outcomes:
- Identify funding strategies that make the most of your existing resources and reach for the vision.
- Describe the economic culture of higher education and evaluate solutions to common budgeting problems.
- Relate the importance of leadership and support from the top-down.
- Communicate the leader's vision and buy-in from the bottom-up.
Space Management for the 21st Century Campus
If higher education is to remain affordable, accessible, and relevant, the new reality for traditional institutions may lie in a paradigm shift from bricks-and-mortar campuses with online curriculum into virtual campuses with physical assets. Algonquin College has actualized this paradigm shift with a proven space management model that has optimized capacity within its physical campus. This presentation reviews our space-mining processes to extract capacity from physical space and our exploration to date into building capacity in virtual space.
Learning Outcomes:
- Construct a roadmap to implement a successful space management model.
- Review an effective and efficient space cost allocation model.
- Assemble a toolkit of space-mining techniques for further investigation.
- Evaluate a transformative model for a virtual college fabric.
TAGS: Community College, International, Canada, Space Management, space planning, Technology, Virtual Space
Transformation From Community College to Four-Year Residential College
In 2008, the state of Georgia required the College of Coastal Georgia to transform from a community college into a four-year residential college. In less than two years, the college president developed a strategic plan that dramatically changed the college's organization, curriculum, and physical environment. Now the college has doubled its enrollment and plans to double in size again. We will track the actions taken to make this successful change, with particular focus on integrated planning that intertwines the physical resolution with the institution's strategic mission and brand.
Learning Outcomes:
- Express how strategy and brand can be integrated into the physical planning process, and why it should be.
- Engage the larger community into the strategic planning process.
- Prepare to make large-scale change happen quickly and effectively.
- Relate how to transform a 1960's commuter campus into a vibrant new residential college.
TAGS: Strategic Planning, Community College to 4-year Residential, Facility_Science, Facility_Student Center, Facility_Student Residences, Town/Gown, Master Planning, integrated planning
Labels: community colleges