FLEXspace: Building a Community For Learning Space Design
How this repository of best practices is bringing together educators, designers, experts and decision-makers to help create innovative learning spaces around the globe.
FLEXspace — the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange —
was born a decade ago out of a desire to more effectively share
classroom information across a single university system. The resource
has since evolved amid a growing community of higher
education participating institutions, with the State University of
New York and California State University systems, Penn State,
and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District among its
earliest supporters. And now, the FLEXspace platform is a onestop
shop for detailed exemplars of learning space design all
over the world, making it an invaluable tool for institutions
planning new or updated spaces.
Recently, Campus Technology visited with Lisa Stephens,
Senior Strategist for Academic Innovation in the Office of the
SUNY Provost and Assistant Dean of the University at Buffalo
School of Engineering, who has guided FLEXspace.org as its
Executive Director since its inception. We asked Stephens about
current and future developments in the FLEXspace platform
and plans for its burgeoning community.
PHOTO © WHO IS DANNY
Campus Technology: Clearly FLEXspace is a great resource
for those who are beginning new projects. What are you doing
to help people get the most out of this rich tool?
Lisa Stephens: Like so many things in life, people seem to
learn about FLEXspace "just in time" through word-of-mouth
when their department, college, or campus starts gathering information
for a new classroom build or renovation.
We strive to make the portal user-friendly for the three main
groups of people who seem to need it most: facilities planners
and architects; faculty, administrators, and learning space support
folks; and the AV/IT integration staff. When launching the
original site, we had a ton of help from friends in each of those
roles, primarily from relationships built through CCUMC,
AVIXA, EDUCAUSE, and SCUP — all of which really helped
with making sure the terminology and key sections of the portal
made sense. And in the past couple years, we've really expanded
the "how to" offerings — especially when the pandemic
hit. FLEXspace became an important go-to place for people to
share information about sanitizing spaces, room acoustics with
faculty and students masked-up, and lots of other tips and tricks
for hybrid/hyflex learning environments.
CT: What are some of the resources designed specifically to help
institutions get started with their planning processes?
Stephens: What has our team most excited at the moment is
the creation of the FLEXspace/Learning spaces Integrated Planning
Pathway — "FLIPP" for short. This iterative process was
originally tried out while EDUCAUSE's Learning Space Rating
System (LSRS) and FLEXspace were both under early development
on a few campuses. We ultimately turned it into a step-by-step process to address the complexities of designing and
building learning spaces.
In a nutshell, we recommend that once a project scope is
identified — a room or rooms, a building, or even an entire
campus — existing spaces can be scored using the LSRS to assess
the factors that contribute to the space's potential efficacy.
These LSRS scores help inform an advisory group, which can
then prioritize efforts and begin using FLEXspace to benchmark
and ideate from peer and aspirant campuses.
CT: Is there a productive way institutions can lay a lot of the
planning ground work before bringing in outside consultants
or designers?
Stephens: The objective is to get an advisory team on the same
page before external consultants, vendors, or planners are brought
in. It's really helpful to have everyone singing from the same music,
albeit with different harmonies, on what pedagogical, facility,
and budget needs are required before you start scenario-building
with contractors. That's not to suggest that an advisory group
should have their recommendations in place before talking with
external consultants. Often times you need fresh eyes to envision solutions and add signature aesthetics.
But when the core campus team of faculty,
planners, and AV/IT folks are all in agreement
on the basic parameters, it saves a lot
of time, effort, and resources when executing
a new project.
Expanding just a bit more on the
FLIPP, if I may: What a gift the Learning
Space Rating System has been, integrated
with FLEXspace. In many ways, it's a gift
of time. For example, you don't necessarily
have to tie up staff time to evaluate
spaces within the project scope. Spending
a little time with a group of student
assistants, running them through the
LSRS criteria and evaluation spreadsheet
should be enough.
The LSRS creators have suggested that
the best use of this scoring tool is for internal
benchmarking. Scores from nearly
identical spaces may vary from campus to
campus, but I'm pretty much convinced
that they did such a good job writing
the criteria that scores should hold fairly
steady across institutions.
When aggregating scores across the
project scope, it's easy to assume investment
priority just by ranking the scores.
But it's an incomplete picture to assume
that low ranking rooms always need attention
or upgrades before higher ranking
rooms. The first step in the FLIPP
process, is to ensure the campus registrar
and an institutional analysis representative
are included as part of the advisory
team so they can report on the growth of
popular program enrollment. That feedback
can sway investment priorities both
in terms of technology and renovation.
Once you've got the foundational
LSRS data to work with, this is where
your advisors shine: They can use their
background discipline and expertise to
search the FLEXspace collection and look
for spaces with attributes that they really
care about. The most rewarding part is
when people with diverse points of view
come back and find that many of the
same spaces have gotten their attention.
CT: What are some of the best new features
of FLEXspace in the past year or so?
Stephens: The shared idea boards have
had a big impact. The portal is robust
enough that when a group of advisors
each has an account, the lead facilitator
can create a shared idea board inside the
portal, to which each participant can tag
and add their selected spaces. It's an easy
way to see who's attracted to what spaces,
and it really helps kick off conversations,
whether you're Zooming together or
meeting in person. We suggest using
some guiding questions to help clarify the
value of different spaces to the group. The
bottom line is that the FLIPP planning
process with idea boards enables an
advisory group to make recommendations
to senior executive leadership with really
well-grounded rationale, and team
members can easily build a presentation
that can be shared internally, or even
externally when working with contractors
through the shared collaboration tools.
CT: The ultimate success of FLEXspace
is of course dependent on participation.
Are you planning any new strategies to
foster the FLEXspace community in
terms of increased sharing?
Stephens: Obviously each campus competes
for rankings and students, but the
sharing ethos is grounded in wanting to
better society through our combined efforts
— which is what makes working in
higher education so rewarding. Having
recently worked through a large room
renovation process, I can vouch for my
colleagues' long hours and hard work and
professionalism that spilled into evenings
and weekends to ensure the campus could
safely open this past fall. We all want our
institutions to succeed.
Currently, as new spaces are added to
the collection, they are displayed in upload
order, so a space uploaded on Thursday
will show up in front of a space uploaded
the previous Tuesday. I think our
user base knows this when they open the
general collection, but you can also filter
on recent additions as well as on a range
of space attributes.
I'd like to work with our developers,
our advisory board, and our FLEXspace
community members, to find more
prominent ways to reward the upload of
spaces and toolkit resources. We planned
a conference to launch an editorial board
that would guide peer-based awards — "the FLEXIs" — but that rollout was delayed
when the pandemic struck.
As one of our founding members has
said from nearly Day One, "We need to
find a way to make sure my boss understands
that our campus is drawing positive
attention as the result of these FLEXspace
contributions." We can help by
adding more data analytics features that
track viewing "likes" and track trends so
we can better inform research around the
teaching and learning practices.
In the end, the success of FLEXspace
is not just about a collection of pretty or
impressive spaces — it's about how we
use them in service of the students. And
to achieve that, we must not only create a
superb tool, but also build an ever more
connected community.
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Spaces4Learning.