Planning Learning Spaces

Learning spaces, whether formal or informal, virtual or physical, are places where the core mission of higher education institutions intersects with the diversity of professional interests and responsibilities on campus. Students learn in them, faculty work in them, and just about everyone else—from designers to builders to physical plant staff to information technology staff to budget officials to enrollment managers to space planners—have interests that intersect in these important spaces.

SCUP's publications and events programming routinely include learning space design knowledge, including enough workshops and concurrent sessions at it's annual, international conference and idea marketplace to constitute a complete track. Higher education's premier planning conference in 2010, Integrated Leadership for a New Reality, is SCUP–45 in Minneapolis, July 10–14.

Related SCUP Resources

The resources listed here are merely a sampling. Use the "Search scup.org" function in the upper right-hand corner of each of SCUP's web pages to search the society's website for more.

SCUP has two Lyris-based email discussion lists that are pertinent to this topic. [dgdc-talk] is about the broader area of managing campus space and [smartc] is more specifically about the design of interior learning space, including technologies.

SCUP and Herman Miller conducted a major survey on the key factors driving learning space design in 2008. The report can be downloaded free: Learning Space Factors Report (PDF).

In Sync: Environmental Behavior Research and the Design of Learning Spaces author Lennie Scott-Webber took what used to "sit on shelves in the ivory halls of academe" and has applied it to the physical design of interior learning spaces. Read a sample chapter here. Also, you can listen to this 40-minute audio interview of Scott-Webber and SCUPer Susan Painter being interviewed by SCUP author Phil Waite about the application of academic and scientific resrarch to the everyday work of planning and design.

The 2009 SCUP Portfolio, Make Way for Millennials: How Students Are Shaping Learning in Higher Education, includes 13 peer-reviewed articles and 3 book reviews from two themed issues of Planning for Higher Education. This portfolio is of special interest to planners interested in the intersection between student services, academic programming, and learning space design.

SCUP senior staffer Terry Calhoun has produced a few light-hearted columns on learning spaces, including: Refuge, Prospect, and Intimacy Gradients; Virtual Tattoos in Learning Spaces; TEAL is Not the Color of MIT's Introductory Physics Classroom; and Comfortable, Pleasant, and Maintained for Learning.

Featured Other Resources

Learning Spaces is a downloadable EDUCAUSE e-Book. As well, EDUCAUSE has a Learning Spaces collection of conference presentations.

Please see the resource at the bottom of this page that will let you search, all at once, several higher education media resources that cover related topics. Of special note is The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds blog.

In addition, there are two trade magazines which cover related area, College Planning & Management and American School & University.

University Business magazine holds an annual conference called EduComm that is specifically about AV & IT in higher education and Campus Technology magazine has a focus on AV & IT.

Related Organizations

EDUCAUSE, and its EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have probably the most extensive set of related resources, focusing mostly but not solely on IT.

PKAL: Project Kaleidoscope has a long-term interest in and many useful resources about learning space design in STEM areas.

TLT Group: Teaching, Learning, and Technology

These associations have niche interests in learning space design: ACUHO, the Association of College and University Housing Officers; ACUI, the Association of College Unions, International; and NIRSA, the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association.

Search Higher Education Media

Enter your terms in the box above to search several higher education news media publications, trade magazines, and websites, including: American School & University, The Chronicle of Higher Education, College Planning & Managament, Inside Higher Ed, Today's Campus, and University Business.