Learning Resources

Abstract: Traditional campuses are being challenged by the digital transformation of higher education. The unquestioned need for synchronous place and time is evaporating. Assumptions about academic calendars, faculty, and geography are now either obsolete or optional. A thicket of demographic and business issues reduces institutional options. Academic tradition limits innovation. Investments in the physical campus and those who plan them are being questioned as never before. To be justified—for campuses to matter—they must provide value that is not available by other means. Existing campuses need to be rethought and transformed as if their survival were at stake.

Abstract: There are literally thousands of studies on retention efforts; however, the role of the built environment at the campus level is largely ignored. Using data from 103 universities in the United States with high research activities, we found strong positive associations between three campus qualities—(1) greenness, (2) urbanism, and (3) on-campus living—and student retention and graduation rates after controlling for student selectivity, class size, total undergraduate enrollment, and university type. Overall, this research provides new insight for university administrators, campus planners, and higher education researchers about the significance of the campus built environment in retention efforts.

Abstract: The phenomenon of universities building luxury dormitories or commissioning headline-grabbing landmarks as a means of gaining an edge over other institutions has become one of the most conspicuous trends in modern campus design. However, this is no new practice. Roberts and Taylor consider how, since the Middle Ages, the physical environment of a university has been perceived as a decisive factor in attracting staff and students and acquiring the competitive advantage that leads to success.

Abstract: The forms and layouts of classrooms reflect the societies and economies that students will face when they graduate. As happened in the previous two industrial revolutions, classrooms today need to respond to an emerging “third industrial revolution,” with its demand for innovation and creativity and its provision of information on demand. Active learning classrooms represent a transition to a future in which most learning will no longer happen in what we call a “classroom” today. Instead, students and teachers will be able to move to a variety of spaces, on demand, in order to accommodate different kinds of intelligences and pedagogies.

Abstract: Globally, changes in demographic and financial realities—and shifts in educational approach to meet these new challenges—require colleges and universities to reorient to support new educational models. In the process, institutions are recasting both what higher education is and how a physical environment can serve it. A look at the diverse approaches schools are taking to planning, design, and building around the world produces a revealing snapshot of a fast-changing future for campuses and the new experience students and young workers will come to know. Amidst all this change, the campus—in all its evolving forms—matters as much as ever.

Abstract: This is a revised version of the article originally published in Planning for Higher Education 43 (4), Summer 2015.
We are seeing an emergent campus type driven by a desire around the world for economically accessible, community-focused—and community-grown—learning and knowledge creation in a networked digital age. While questions about the future of the traditional campus have been a central focus of higher education discussions, off to the side there is a groundswell of learning activities that is all about the “there” there while also being everywhere. Grounded in physical communities, these activities strive to connect home, school, and work in a continuous lifelong learning path nourished by open digital resources. This is the Networked Community (College) for the growing legions of Citizen Learners. While seemingly peripheral to traditional higher education, this new model represents an approach that increasingly will be central to learning and knowledge creation in the 21st century not only beyond a traditional institution’s boundaries but also at its very core.

Abstract: Integrated planning is a key concept for higher education planners. But it is difficult to define and even harder to express through individual competencies. Questions remain: what are the key constructs of integrated planning, what skill sets compose integrated planning, and how can it be measured? We suggest that integrated planning cannot be fully examined at the level of the individual planner, but rather that integrated planning is an institutional manifestation—understood only through organizational observation. This article explores this concept and makes a case for integrated planning as an organizational competency. We explain why orienting from this perspective is critical to success.

Abstract: This article lays the groundwork for “the connected university” as the most desirable, most robust operational platform for both achieving institutionally coherent integrated planning and delivering on the mandate to grow, challenge, and inspire creative young minds. Beginning with Bateson’s prescription that we “learn to think as Nature thinks” and appreciating not only the connectivity and related mental processes embedded in large-scale natural systems but also the inherent connectivity and associated mental processes underlying our disparate branches of knowledge, the author argues for a more experimental and deliberate approach to manifesting this connectivity and the corresponding critically important mental processes across the structures, departments, pedagogical forms, and policies of our universities. Our universities too, he says, need to learn to think as Nature thinks. He points to the “connectivity imperative” voiced over the years by thought leaders in multiple fields, including Thomas Homer-Dixon, Franz Johansson, Albert Einstein, Vartan Gregorian, and Buckminster Fuller while at the same time acknowledging the obstacles to connectivity so deeply embedded in our university cultures, practices, politics, and reward systems. Turning to his own story, the author recounts how as a youngster, prompted by a unique gift of Chopin’s music and Einstein’s writings, he first began to think about the exciting hidden connections to be discovered by combining and savoring experiences from different disciplines. He underscores the tricky interplay of belief and perception as we endeavor to figure out how the world works—how what we believe informs perception and how new perceptions, mediated by learning and experience, can inform what we believe—charging our educational systems, and higher education in particular, with the responsibility of helping students form their world-defining “inner Eye,” that “eye” through which they perceive the world around them and conceive their worlds of the future. He concludes with a list of prototypes and “winning solutions” that have enhanced connectivity within several universities with which he has had personal involvement. His vision for the transformation of universities is ultimately pragmatic as well as idealistic, moving institutions toward greater connectivity through the proliferation of modestly scaled “pocket” connectivity programs as well as university-wide integrated planning initiatives where larger scale and more radical visions might be debated and strategized with unfettered imagination and a sense of urgency.

Abstract: This article combats traditional notions of higher education planning by emphasizing a “planning as playmaking” approach that stresses authentic, active, integrative, and ongoing planning that drives change. The results of a recent survey reveal the value of integrated planning across higher education—building relationships across boundaries, aligning planning practices, creating a sustainable culture of change—but sputtering attempts at implementing these concepts durably. Five essential strategies help institutions fill the gap: balancing creativity and discipline, connecting choices to underlying values, developing planners across the institution, celebrating the “expert-generalist,” and bridging pragmatism and ambition to foster sound implementation.