University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Phase II: Learning Landscape

Cultivating the Learning Landscape

Where can learning and discovery happen on a university campus? Everywhere. This is the foundation of the Learning Landscape approach, and a too-often ignored principle in campus planning. Planning for a diverse landscape of spaces — from specialized to multipurpose and formal to informal — maximizes encounters among people, places, and ideas.

Cultivating a thriving 21st Century Learning Landscape is a critical component to achieving Academic Excellence and to creating places that connect UB as a community and with the community. With a talented faculty, outstanding student body, and ambitious plans, UB has already sown many of the seeds for this future and its campuses already have many spaces and programs to support this vision. However, new strategies and concepts are needed to invigorate, supplement, and grow what exists in order to achieve the UB 2020 Vision.

The Strategies and Concepts presented here are grounded in the Visioning and Assessment activities that engaged UB students, faculty, staff, and community, and represent a palette or menu of options on the path to achieving UB’s vision. Through feedback from the UB community, these will be refined and an implementation plan developed so that UB’s Learning Landscape can grow over time to encompass the range of places, activities, and technologies that are vital to a great University and a great region.

Visioning: Principles

The Visioning and Analysis Phase of the UB 2020 Master Plan process resulted in nine overarching principles to guide the development of the learning landscape at the University at Buffalo. By using the nine principles as a foundational guideline for the design and implementation of new and renovated learning infrastructure, the entire UB Campus is conceived as a “network of places” for learning, discovery, and discourse between students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.

1. Animate all significant paths and places with visible activities and landmarks.
2. Create magnetic hubs or “anchors” using core shared learning spaces.
3. Increase diversity and density of space types, uses and “ownership models.” Include a balance of “communal” and “territorial”, “formal,” and “informal spaces.”
4. Intersperse “specialized” spaces with “multi-purpose” and “in-between” spaces.
   
5. Enable significant places to serve multiple uses and user-groups, and empower students to interpret and use spaces in creative ways.
   
6. Improve flow and connections for people, activities and information.
   
7. Consolidate and integrate service access points.
   
8. Demonstrate results with pilot projects and learn from experimental spaces.
   
9. Organize and clarify space uses. Help users understand locations relative to visible landmarks, indoor and outdoor, and specific program elements.

Assessment: Learning Space Capacity Planning

Assessment of existing spaces leads to Preliminary Recommendations for UB to consider such as:

• Introduce a series of “distributed teaching and learning hubs”
• Increase its allocation of space per student in order to enable a variety of pedagogies
• Convert tablet arm chair-equipped classrooms
• Introduce more small-scale (e.g.: seminar rooms) centrally-scheduled classrooms on both campuses.
• Consider allocating a seminar room to each department as a hybrid space that is controlled by the department for classes, but available to others on-demand (though not for regularly scheduled classes)
• Introduce informal learning settings to be mutually-supportive of formal ones.
• Consider repurposing the ‘worst offender’ classrooms.
• Implement pilot projects to introduce new and innovative learning settings

Assessment: Palette of Formal Learning Spaces

The strategy for providing formal learning spaces should take into account a diverse set of pedagogies, ranging from Didactic to Experimental, and the physical environments and tools needed to support them.

Strategy: Formal Learning Spaces

Today’s formal learning spaces include centrally- or departmentally-scheduled classrooms which are assigned the whole semester and situated along a spectrum from specialized to multi-purpose. Upgrading existing spaces to meet 21st Century teaching and learning design criteria and augmenting them with a range of additional spaces that support a diversity of pedagogies and sizes, can be complemented by adding hub spaces bookable on-demand. These “Hubs,” potentially located both inside and outside of Libraries, can serve as University-wide resources that promote student and faculty interaction, offer increased flexibility and effectiveness, and support University-wide initiatives like the Strategic Strengths.”

General Multi-Purpose Spaces

In this scenario, learning spaces are standardized to offer a consistent package of settings, furnishings and technology within all rooms.

Mixed Spaces (Recommended Option)

A mixed scenario assumes classes are assigned one particular space for most of the semester (as a “homebase”), but occasionally take advantage of other spaces which are bookable on demand.

Diverse, On-Demand

This scenario envisions a diverse, wide range of learning spaces managed by a space management system that allows faculty to vary the types of spaces they use during a semester.

Concepts: Learning Spaces and Buildings

Creating change, big and small, local and university-wide, is the objective of these campus concepts. We see these concepts always acting both independently and interdependently—each concept with its own power to thrive and transform a local context, but where a synergistic whole is far more powerful than the sum of the parts.