NEWS Digitalisation and the tough competition for students and researchers is creating a new playing field for universities. In order to tackle the challenges there is now a need for environments that stimulate creativity — and Umeå University is at the forefront.
The classic lecture theatre has basically remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. It was conceived with a focus on the teacher, without a thought for the possibility of any discussion in the room. The increase in seminars and laboratories in the 19th century brought some modifications to this arrangement, but university-learning environments basically changed very little until the early 21st century.
A transformation of universities is now in progress all over the world. Lecture theatres are giving way to flexible, interactive, dynamic teaching rooms — and pedagogic practices are changing in pace with technology. Those at the forefront are above all American universities such as MIT, the University of Minnesota and Stanford University.
“The trend is clear. In the USA there are around 100 institutions that have active learning classrooms with interactive environments and no rostrum at the front,” says Malcolm Brown, the director of the Educause Learning Initiative in Washington.
In Sweden the universities are still in infancy in terms of developing their environments, and apart from Umeå University few of them have got very far. Inspired by developments in the USA, Umeå University is now building fi ve interactive environments — representing an investment of over SEK 71m. The objectives are ambitious, the vision being to become ’one of Europe’s leading universities in terms of innovative physical and virtual environments’ by 2020.
“This venture comprises two components. We’re developing learning environments. The students want to be more involved and experimental in their learning, and this calls for new types of room. We’ll be creating three interactive focus environments in order to increase the collaboration between researchers, students and other groups of society, e.g. companies and schools,” says Anders Fällström, Umeå University’s pro-vice-chancellor.
“This is a natural development for us. Umeå University has always led the way in terms of teaching methods. We were amongst the first to offer distance and network programmes, and we’re the first in Sweden to be making such a big investment.”
What is driving the shift towards more innovative learning environments is rapid technological developments and digitalisation combined with increased globalisation. Add to this the fact that the generation of the 1980s and ’90s, which is now beginning to predominate in the universities, grew up with digital technology. Through the world of computer games they are used to working in groups and experimenting with new platforms.
Having grown up with group communication, e.g. in the form of World of Warcraft, the new students (Generations Y and Z) expect the university environments to match their needs and provide immediate feedback.
A further driving — and transformative — factor is the open university trend. Using your mobile or computer you can very quickly pick and choose free courses from the world’s leading universities, e.g. Yale and MIT.
A completely new playing field is thus being opened up. To cope with the fresh challenges and hold their own against the ever tougher competition for students, the universities need to develop their learning environments and their pedagogic toolbox.
Nanyang Technical University (NTU) in Singapore is one of the international universities at the forefront when it comes to new teaching practices. The teaching rooms are interactive and flexible, and all lessons are recorded and posted on the net.
According to Daniel Tan, assistant professor at NTU and in charge of the Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching, the role of teachers is fundamentally changing.
“Teachers used to be in the foreground. A gradual shift is now taking place whereby many students learn using the web and from each other — so called we-learning. The teacher then becomes more of a facilitator — someone who facilitates and controls learning,” he says.
A popular pedagogic concept that has recently been coming more and more to the fore is the flipped classroom. This involves the students listening to lectures on the net prior to the classes, which instead focus on practical exercises and tasks whereby the students can collaborate and seek the teacher’s help if necessary.
“The traditional teaching roles are changing as a result of the new technology. It used to be the teacher who delivered the content to the students — now it can be the other way round.
The students prepare and present the content whilst the teachers become coaches,” says Malcolm Brown.
In the Social Sciences Building at Umeå University three converted teaching rooms forming part of the first stage of the investment in creative environments have recently begun to be used. The three rooms have different designs, but have a number of features in common: tables with wheels, several large digital screens and a whiteboard or two along the sides. All this is combined with a bright and airy design.
“We can have a professor here from, say, Stanford, who gives the lecture via a video link. The students can ask questions in the meantime, and when the lecture is over the teacher can take over and continue the discussion in the teaching room,” says Bengt Malmros, who develops pedagogic practices at the university.
“This creates more opportunities for the students to be active and collaborate more. You can write straight onto the screen here, for example, and can save your notes. It works like a giant iPad,” says Bengt Malmros, pointing to a 50” display on one of the walls.
Lisbeth Lundahl, Professor of Pedagogic Practices and one of the driving forces behind the venture, wants to play down the flashy element of the new learning environments that are now gradually being developed at Umeå University.
“These are not ’display rooms’ but everyday environments for learning. There are currently so many obstacles, e.g. the cramped and noisy conditions. The important thing is for the halls to be more user-friendly and fl exible, and for the teachers to quickly be able to adapt them on the basis of new pedagogic situations,” she says.
The idea of the new learning environments at Umeå University is to improve the quality of both education and research. But despite more universities trying out innovative learning processes there has not as yet been much research that shows clear results.
“The research into learning has chiefly been about education at a lower level, and there has been very little concerning higher education. Our investment in creative environments also includes examining the learning process in the new premises compared with conventional teaching rooms, and seeing what the results are,” says Lisbeth Lundahl.
Developing pedagogical practices in the new environments will be a major challenge.
“The physical environment, the technology and the teachers — all three components must be optimal. But the most important is the teachers. We will be carrying out extensive further training of us teachers,” says Anders Fällström.
The Swedish-based property company Akademiska hus, which owns over 60 per cent of the country’s university and higher-education buildings, is financing part of the research linked to the venture.
“This research is important to us. We have to understand the universities’ needs and monitor trends. We can apply the results here in Umeå at our other universities,” says David Carlsson, regional director of Akademiska Hus, which owns over 60 per cent of the country’s university and higher education buildings.
It is not just the teaching rooms that are important in terms of getting more involved and active students. The other environments are also important, e.g. the common room, the library and other intermediate spaces. There is a need for colour, design, light, air, variation — and plenty of seating.
Over the past 20 years the teaching time at Swedish universities has halved — from an average of 20 hours a week to 8—10 hours. This means that an increasing part of the teaching takes place outside the teaching rooms.
“The peripheral environments have thus become increasingly important. We have over 30,000 students here in Umeå, and space for them needs to be found somewhere,” says Bengt Malmros, as we walk round the Umeå University campus.
We go through Learning Space — a specially equipped part of the University Library with flexible and colourful furniture and digital screens on the walls. It’s chock-a-block with students here, mostly in groups, but there are also people on their own.
We go on to the Humanities Building, built at the beginning of the 1970s, which is undergoing a major transformation. A bigger entrance with a new facade and flexible new study areas are being built here.
Bengt Malmros points along one of the corridors.
“This will be knocked through, and it will become a 500 square meters open space that will encourage collaboration. And we will also have a 100 square meters interactive space,” he says.
Akademiska hus is paying for the investment in the Humanities Building:
“Attractive learning environments have become a competitive issue. The students want to hang out on campus, sometimes 24 hours a day, and the universities need to be able to meet these demands,” says David Carlsson.
The rapid developments in society will inevitably influence the design of the universities,” according to Rosan Bosch. She is an architect and artist who has specialised in designing knowledge environments in her own company Rosan Bosch, which is based in Copenhagen
“Design and environment are incredibly important components of a learning environment. They influence how we think and feel. Design is a tool for change — and in order to change society we have to start with the school environments,” she says.
“I don’t believe in ’one size fits all’ — differentiation is important. you need to create environments for a number of different situations. Sometimes it’s good to move about, so as to activate the brain, sometimes the students have to work on their own and sometimes you need environments for discussions.”
As leading knowledge hubs the universities should actually be leading this development towards innovative environments, but they aren’t,” says Rosan Bosch:
“Many universities have a false sense of security, but not doing anything is also a choice. The teacher is by far the most important component, but the design can facilitate and stimulate the learning processes,” she says.
Environments that are creative are about creating meeting places that transcend departmental boundaries and disciplines. Historically, this factor has been key to progress in research. You only need to think of the buzz of creativity in Vienna during the first decades of the 20th century, with Freud and Wittgenstein, or the cafés in Lviv in Poland in the ’30s, where a group of researchers developed the modern mathematics that formed the basis of much of the technology we now use every day.
Umeå University’s investment includes building three interactive focus environments — sorts of meeting places for researchers, teachers, students and the rest of society where the various parties will be able to cross-fertilise each other.
“They will be boundary zones between the different disciplines that will facilitate encounters between the different academic fields. And they will be open to the rest of society — you’ll be able to select people from outside,” says Patrik Svensson, a professor at Umeå University and the person in charge of Humlab.
Humlab is an innovative meeting place where researchers and students meet at the interface between digital information technology and the humanities. The digital tools have opened up completely new possibilities for the humanities and have created a new discipline: digital humanities. This new field was most recently investigated at an international workshop at Umeå University in December 2013, during which the participants created their own experimental research expressions, e.g. glued origami paper with circuits, and during which the five top researchers who took part in the final panel participated directly from different parts of the world.
What the new focus environments will be like has not yet been definitively established, but Anders Fällström gives an example:
“If we take the results from all the major instruments in the fields of chemistry, physics and biology and show them on displays at a joint meeting place, exciting things may happen. It may also be a way of making the natural sciences more attractive to schoolgoers, which is also important for the future,” he says.
There is much to support the idea of this type of environment becoming increasingly important in terms of attracting both researchers and students — and in the long term it will also facilitate the results of new research.
A concrete example is the global news item about how drug residues in waste water are creating asocial, bold fish — a story presented by the journal Science at the beginning of 2013. This was a chance result, having started as a conversation between a chemist, two ecologists and an environmental scientist in one of the corridors of the Chemical Biological Centre at Umeå University.
The universities are undergoing a transformation in pace with the development of society. Patrik Svensson makes a comparison with the old banking palaces. They used to be associated with cash, but nowadays there is no actual money left in the banks — just ones and noughts in the server hall.
“We must also transform and develop in order to create the optimum conditions for education and research. It is our responsibility as a university to meet society’s challenges,” says Patrik Svensson.
Text: Johan Wickström
Photo: Elin Berge
Editor: Karin Wikman