1. Plan our work together: We don't believe in cookie-cutter solutions. We work with your staff to develop a plan for engaging faculty, students and key constituencies in considering how the new/renovated facility might support important improvements in how faculty can teach and how students can learn.

2. Educate: we can help you offer a workshop or presentation to get people interested in the possibilities of creative approaches to designing or renovating physical and virtual (online) facilities as a strategy for improving teaching and learning.

3. Evaluate current facilities in terms of exactly how they make certain teaching and learning activities easy, and hard. Work with the team to help them find and critique examples of facilities (physical and virtual) that already support such teaching and learning at other institutions. (Click here for a list of such teaching and learning activities, with examples of physical and virtual facilities that make them easier). And we can do a matrix survey to estimate where facilities are most valuable or most in need of improvement; matrix surveys are uniquely valuable when different facilities are equipped differently and used in different disciplines.

4. Explore: Use spaces from other institutions to help your group expand its sense of what kinds of teaching and learning activities become feasible if the facilities are designed appropriately.

5. Lower barriers and increase incentives for quick, effective utilization of new facilities: Engage more faculty and students in a continuing dialogue about how to support these kinds of changes. The goal: when the facility becomes available, it should swiftly, fully and effectively be used to support qualitatively different, better forms of teaching and learning.  To continue the example, if an institution for the first time introduced classrooms with chairs that rolled, and plenty of space to move them around, the goal would be that, on day 1, faculty choosing to use those rooms would all be taking advantage of the mobility to begin doing small group work and other teaching approaches that benefit from having chairs that move. 

6. Work with 'architects' to develop plan that meets your needs: we can then work with the folks who are designing your new or renovated facilities (physical and/or on-line) to help assure that those facilities meet your needs

7. Do post-occupancy evaluation: we can also develop plans for evaluating the use of the new facilities, both to estimate return on estimate and, more importantly, to identify improvements in implementation so that the new facility will be even more effectively used.

Examples of TLT Group work on physical and online learning spaces:

• Butler University - online workshop for college committee beginning work on major building renovation

• Oregon State University - collaborate in development of evaluation of university course management system

• Golden Gate University – support for Ratcliff Architects in their work with the university on a plan for renovating a classroom building

• University of Wyoming – interviews and workshop to stimulate thinking about renovation of a classroom building (2 days)

• Virginia Commonwealth University – help plan and implement a day-long, university-wide workshop on learning space design

• EDUCAUSE – participated in planning and offering an international workshop on learning space design