JISC

The post-16 sector is enjoying a massive injection of capital investment in new buildings that is beginning to transform the experiences of learners across the sector and is placing technology at the heart of exciting and sometimes spectacular new college buildings. With the Learning and Skills Council expecting to invest a further £2.3bn in capital investment in England up to 2011, the sector will continue to undergo rapid transformation in the coming years.Buildings and learning spaces, create the conditions to enable experiences that motivate and engage learners.
 
JISC Regional Support Centres are providing support and guidance in this area and one example of this support is yesterday’s RSC Eastern event in Cambridge entitled ‘Innovations in Learning Spaces’.

Bringing together examples of new build and refurbishment projects, the workshop explored new ways of thinking about innovative design - particularly for libraries and learning resources centres - and looked at how such design can support innovations in pedagogy and improve the learner experience.

Richard Everett, Director of e-Learning at Oaklands College spoke about a £100m new build project at his college, which, he said, arose from the college’s strategic vision to become ‘outstanding’ by 2011 and to make the ‘IT learner experience exemplary’. Pedagogy, he said, ‘should drive the agenda’ in all such projects, but there was also the need for the college to provide ‘an attraction’ for prospective students.

The aim of the project was, he continued, an ‘intelligent building’, flexible and responsive, and one which put the learner experience at the forefront. There were to be no internal walls unless they could be justified, he said; neither was there to be a learning resource centre (LRC) as such – a ‘controversial idea’, he conceded, but one which was justified by the college’s new and innovative approaches to learner support, another objective of its strategic vision.

A sense that the very concept of the library was changing and being redefined was a feature of the day, and Teresa Wicklen, Head of Learning Resources at the College of West Anglia, emphasised this point when speaking about her college’s new building project which directly linked social spaces to the LRC. ‘We need to encourage learning wherever it takes place,‘ she said, suggesting too that the ‘wow factor’ in new and exciting building projects could also have a significant impact on learner engagement.
 
In presentations outlining smaller projects, delegates heard about the need for compliance with disability legislation from Brenda Thomson of Great Yarmouth College, from Louise Lichfield of Luton Sixth Form College, and from Tim Giles, Librarian at Norwich School of art and Design.

For the latter, transforming a nineteenth century listed former school building provided its own challenges, including the need to keep many of the original features while providing a responsive and flexible space for the particular needs of art and design students. ‘We didn’t want to create a stage whereby we had to tell users what they couldn’t do,’ he said. ‘The architecture and the layout were meant to give them an intuitive sense of what the space was for.’

The design also needed to reflect a greater customer service ethos than previously and this needed to be reflected in the design. Citing the JISC- and British Library-commissioned Google Generation report, he also suggested that the need for librarians to continue to provide information-searching and handling skills was particularly important, and therefore another factor that library designers needed to bear firmly in mind.

Jacquie Kelly of JISC infoNet spoke about their ‘Planning and Designing technology-rich learning spaces’ infoKit which gives advice and guidance to all staff in FE and HE in this area. Building on earlier Innovation work including the 2006 publication ‘Designing spaces for effective Learning’, the infoKit provides case studies, a comprehensive Flickr photo library, a virtual campus tour and a host of other resources, which speakers praised throughout the day as being an invaluable starting point for the planning of new build and refurbishment projects.

Citing the John Seely Brown quote, that ‘all learning starts with a conversation’, Jacquie said that new buildings needed to reflect this fact so that senior managers, teaching and LRC staff could, through their buildings and learning spaces, ‘create the conditions to enable to flow experiences that motivate and engage learners.’

Further presentations from North Hertfordshire College and Oaklands College completed a full day. Presentations will soon be available on the RSC Eastern website and podcast interviews with some of the speakers will be available on the JISC website shortly.

 Further RSC information