Learning Spaces: A Unique Approach at Carleton College

Editor's Notes

• #2: I will be speaking on Carleton College's approach to studying learning spaces and how those findings changed our thoughts about learning space design and perhaps more importantly, our ideas about supporting them.  I will also share a plan for a new arts complex called the Arts Union and in particular, a new facility called the Idea Lab.  The Idea Lab is a brand new space designed to bring together staff who support visual and technology needs in a collaborative space.
• #3: In the fall of 2007 Carleton College received a Mellon grant to study the way visual assignments could be better supported across the campus.  The report from this study entitled "Curricular Uses of Visual Materials:  A Mixed Method Institutional study" was written by three of my colleagues Andrea Nixon, Heather Tompkins and Paula Lackie who I want to thank for letting me share information from their report.
• #4: The question at the foundation of the study was: "Are the sources of support that the College provides well suited to the work demanded of students and faculty as they make curricular use of visual materials?"  Keeping in mind the change in assignments from papers, class presentations, text analyses, (very text heavy assignments), to today's assignments that involve images, multimedia and the visual display of data, this was a very worthy question.  Though most of us support units that routinely use images in their assignments, I think most of us also feel the rising need of departments all across our campuses seeking to use visual materials. There are two aspects of the study I will be talking about today.  Case studies of student assignments and surveys of students that came after the completion of the case studies.
• #5: The case studies were done in a unique ethnographic way, pioneered by Nancy Fried Foster at the University of Rochester, using interviews of students, following their path to different support centers on campus, tracking where and when they studied.  The case studies at Carleton followed four different student assignments that were expected to incorporate a visual element in completing those assignments.  Students involved in the case studies were given cameras to take pictures of where they worked and location logs to chart the time they spent in each place.  Students were interviewed by trained student researchers about their assignments prior to beginning them and after completion.  These oral interviews were transcribed, coded and analyzed.  Then members of staff and students were asked to analyze the data in a co-viewing/co-listening process designed to glean key ideas from these interviews.  Also flip charts were put in key service points and two questions were asked:  Why do you study here and What is missing? From this data, a GIS map of how the students used the campus was created.
• #6: These are the assignments chosen to participate in the study: creating a film, a group presentation, a film analysis project and creating a map for a science course. Just to give some context to the first assignment, the short film, the professor wanted her 25 students to learn: creativity in narrative, placement of the camera, depth of composition, and editing She wanted them to learn these tools: FinalCut Pro, operating a camera, and the associated equipment For support she used: one full-time staff member who provided initial training, then provided support in a department lab during his hours The Campus Spaces used: the departmental computing lab , with filming occurring on campus, The challenges for students: learning new software, managing files, using the facility and equipment when available, and creating sufficiently overt assignments demonstrating a comprehension of the conceptual elements of filmmaking Pretty demanding for 100 level students.!
• #7: When looking at the data from this case study and the others, what jumps out immediately is that even on difficult assignments, students work very late.  The time of day students preferred to work was from 5pm to midnight. 
• #8: They also preferred working in dorms or the library, even on challenging assignments. Buildings in blue and orange are residence halls and two floors of the campus library. These findings are probably not amazing news to most of us, but if you think back to the descriptions of the film short assignment, you'll see that there were some atypical challenges put to your average undergraduate.  The creation of a video has many steps, the professor required 100-level students to use Final Cut pro, a higher-end editing tool and if a student chose to work on that late at night the night before it's due, you can understand the bind this would put the student in.  I took part in the co-viewing/co-listening analysis of this assignment myself, in which I read interview transcripts of students and the professor.  It was amazing to hear the wide variety of ways by which students cobbled their assignments together, hearing their frustration on the lack of support in evening hours and then hearing the prof's analysis of how these assignments could be better if less time could be spent on learning technical skills. 
• #9: Other recommendations from the case studies included that for these types of assignments, support should be for all students, not only those who are struggling.  Communication about the support available needed to improve.  Course-specific help needed to be coordinated to support the assignments, especially those requiring high-end tools.  Identifying where that support existed on campus (sometimes in multiple places) needed to be accomplished.  Times support centers were open with support needed to change and needed to reflect the multi-faceted ways students work.  And finally, spaces need to be designed to create work environments conducive to accomplishing these types of assignments.  With professors it was clear they needed to plan more intensely with staff, sometimes teams of staff, to support these assignments.
• #10: I’m going to go on now to survey information gathered from students, 790 students were sent the poll, 39% responded. The questions of the survey were again about where and when students work, what characteristics they seek out in study spaces, and if working on familiar assignments or more difficult or unfamiliar assignments, made a difference in where and when they worked.
• #11: The survey asked students to differentiate between familiar and challenging assignments and here we see that even when they had difficult assignments, the previous pattern prevails in where they work, with their dorm or living space and the library being the big winners.
• #12: When students were asked about who they sought out for support, their classmates and professors were the clear standouts with staff, prefects and fellow students in their major being less represented.  Just to note there's some evidence that students underreported using staff. The data collected from the staff survey indicated a healthy amount of support given to students.
• #13: Another clear finding from the survey was revealed in the difference in support sought by class year.  Students at Carleton declare their majors at the end of sophomore year.  If you look at the red line, you can see that as students were acculturated to their major, they seek more and more support from professors. 
• #14: It's also interesting to notice in this graph the use of prefects, student workers, and staff by freshman and even sophomores, at higher levels than upper classmen. 
• #15: Here again is data from the survey showing times of day when students work on both familiar and challenging assignments.  It mirrors the case study results.  Students do the most work between 4pm and midnight. So students, like students of all time, work on even the challenging and technical assignments in late evening hours.  Also perhaps the lack of using staff is revealed here too, we're probably not working during the 4pm to midnight period!
• #16: When looking at when students use support by class year, we can see that there is a peak in the afternoon with upper classmen showing up their younger counterparts for seeking support.  So it would seem to be valid to try to get the attention of underclassmen to follow this example. You can also see the high spike from freshman and the general overall spike in the later evening hours.
• #17: Students also show strong indicators they know when to approach faculty, from noon to 4pm, and in the later hours (following the ascending red line), they go increasingly to their fellow students, majors, prefects and student workers.
• #18: In a further analysis done in another document published in Educause Quarterly entitled, Aligning Learning Space Design and Student Work: Research Implications for Design Processes and Elements, Andrea Nixon notes:
• #19: Effective learning space design should be rooted in an understanding of the ways in which students engage a campus. (Study your users) Research suggests that there are significant differences in the ways students report seeking curricular support based on their class year. This finding has important implications for learning space design. Students seek different characteristics of learning spaces depending on the type of assignment they are working on. Campus learning space design must align with the curriculum and student work. In addition she also notes that frequently the way student spaces are designed and how funds are allocated, align with the organizational boundaries of the institution.  The top three places to study at Carleton (dorms, the library, and student center) were places reported up through the dean of students, the chief academic officer and the vice president of finance - half the members of Carleton's presidential cabinet.  Therefore, the ways students engage the college span the budget and finance of specific locations.
• #20: Understanding the work demanded of students plays, is key to providing support. I promise this is the last graph! At Carleton students named the top five characteristics for places to study for all kinds of assignments were those that were conveniently located, had low distraction level, were open late hours, were quiet, and had comfortable furniture.  While this is a good baseline from which to start, a single design template will not fit for everything. Variation in study space design should take into account the types of assignments students encounter in their courses.  One simple difference in space characteristics can be noted. 
• #21: If students were working on writing assignments, they wanted solitude, comfortable furniture and wireless access. Whereas students working with problem sets, image creation, lab assignments, exams and presentations wanted a space where support was nearby.  When new dormitory study spaces were designed at Carleton, these findings were applied.  Some have the quiet comfortable wireless. Some have data projectors, whiteboards and large tables encouraging group work.
• #22: Thinking more about how class year plays a large way in which students engage support, there is another pattern to note — the role departmental learning spaces played.  Departmental learning spaces are hubs where majors congregate during and after class hours, often with high-end tools present. Here's the description of a departmental work space by a participating junior, in this case, a study lounge: Student: It’s pretty casual. If you have lunch there, you may have lunch with a professor if they come in. It’s just really, really casual. You can interact with, like, senior majors and younger students, and just kind of like get to know the department. This student went on to contrast this department lounge with a campus-wide space: Student: When I was a freshman I worked more in the Library and the CMC [Center for Mathematics and Computing]. The CMC is very campus-friendly, campus-wide, it’s friendly to everyone on campus. But when you get to like the lounges [specific academic buildings associated with the sciences], [it] gets more specific to major.
• #23: In addition to recognizing Departmental-Based support for majors, a support map shown here was created primarily for underclassmen, the group that used staff and campus wide support centers most. We hand this out to incoming freshman during new student week. The symbols on the map are posted at locations that provide support and we even have buttons that we wear. We’re trying to create a brand identity and acceptance about seeking support on campus. (And yes, we ripped off Trivial Pursuit, which I doubt our students even know about) Other ways this study has been translated to Carleton is that many support locations are open later hours and have staff, like reference librarians and academic technologists, work some evening hours.  Student work is also programmed later into the evening and student staff are being trained more intensely based on what assignments are scheduled in courses. 
• #24: For staff like me there were other significant changes.  One was the development of a coordinated support model. The coordinated support model was an effort to inventory all types of support across campus and get us sharing ideas, seeing where we overlap or gap, and collaborate on plans for support.  Another development was the production meeting, an idea we took from animation and film studios. At production meetings, profs who are developing new assignments bring their ideas to a staff member, then teams of staff are selected to provide ideas, schedule time in the term for supporting steps in completing assignments and track the assignment through the whole term.  At a recent panel discussion at Carleton about the first round of these production meetings, staff reported that working in teams when everybody knows what they're doing and when they're doing it, was hugely successful and students were able to complete very demanding assignments on time and with success.  One prof confessed he would never have had the same outcome had he ventured to do this alone.  Working with the team, he and his students were kept to a schedule, parsing out steps in the process with multiple deadlines and appointments with staff throughout the term.  As with most institutions, staffing levels are staying pretty much flat, so questions about scaling this model towards the entire campus still need answering.
• #25: Andrea Nixon, chief author of the study, makes this statement about the important role of staff in all of this.  She states: Creative collaborations between faculty and staff members in the development of assignments are the points at which the curriculum meets the support structure of the College.  This is where we as staff members play a vital role and with the intensity of assignments only increasing, we will be needed to support this change.
• #26: I also want to share briefly about the Idea Lab in the new Arts Union complex.  In 2006, Carleton purchased a middle school two blocks from the main campus, planning to transform it into a new home for many of the arts.  This project has gone through two phases, pre-economic downturn and post-economic downturn.  In the first phase, my unit, Art and Art History, were moving but in the second phase it was ruled out as too costly.  The units that are moving are the Art Gallery, Theater and Dance, and Cinema and Media studies. 
• #27: The Idea Lab is also a part of this complex.  This facility will house our media support unit called PEPS which supports audio/visual projects all across campus and at times other support staff will be able to use the spaces, host meetings and workshops, using the technology available.  This space has around 4,000 square feet and it will be broken up into the Idea Lab Collaborative space which is a flexible lab space with multiple computer stations, multiple large monitors on the walls, whiteboards, audio/video.  Other spaces include a PEPS workspace with audio/video editing stations and high-end printing There are also offices, storage, an 24-hour lab, a video/photo studio and a super deluxe club house for mixing and editing.  What everyone is very excited about is to have a sort of one-stop shop for so much activity.  Though it is two blocks from the main campus, this unit can only be seen as a huge draw for students, staff and faculty alike.  In this we hope to provide another option in the suite of learning spaces on campus. I have been personally involved in various steps throughout this process involving the grants, the coordinated support model, the case studies, the creation of the support map, and the planning of the Idea Lab.  In the first version of the Idea Lab, I was beginning to plan a new Visual Resources Collection space with even a room for the slides.  My slide libe is being kept intact in the cramped environs of the Art building but there will be changes to my space sooner or later.  I was happy the study recognized department study hubs.  I intend to foster that role for the Visual Resources Collection as many majors seek to use our scanners, copy photography stand and expertise. We received an additional Mellon grant for developing visually intense assignments on campus in 2009.  These Viz grants will be starting up this summer and it my good fortune to be named in several so I'll get to experience the production meeting and coordinated support model first hand. My advice to you is to stay vigilant about changes in the nature of assignments at your institution. Go to your professors, ask them what they’re planning. Track your constituents’ use and their desired use of your facility.  Cross train your student staff to fill the needs of intense assignments and have them staff the later hours when students want to work.  Collaborate with other staff and highly trained student workers to form your own production meetings.  Foster your departmental support hubs.  Replace some office furniture with comfy chairs and a large flat panel video screen or whiteboard.  Ask those who use your buildings what their favorite places are and why. 
• #28: My advice to you is to stay vigilant about changes in the nature of assignments at your institution. Go to your professors, ask them what they’re planning. Track your constituents’ use and their desired use of your facility.  Cross train your student staff to fill the needs of intense assignments and have them staff the later hours when students want to work. 
• #29: Collaborate with other staff and highly trained student workers to form your own production meetings.  Foster your departmental support hubs.  Replace some office furniture with comfy chairs and a large flat panel video screen or whiteboard.  Ask those who use your buildings what their favorite places are and why. 
• #30: I encourage you to read the study by my colleagues and do your own analysis of your learning spaces.