The Flashlight approach can be applied to evaluating learning spaces in order to improve them and use them better. That assertion is based on the following premises:

• The educational value of a space is mainly determined by the teaching/learning activities that it supports. 
• There is often a mismatch between what faculty or students might do and what their learning space makes easy. Result: they do something else instead, something less productive or fulfilling.
• So inquiry into the matches and mismatches between needs, activities and spaces can help programs plan better training, better space allocation, space renovation, and the creation of the kinds of new learning spaces most likely to be used to improve learning.

Here is a survey designed to ask faculty about their ideal learning spaces. This is a first draft. And here is a companion survey that could be used by faculty to evaluate existing learning spaces; this is a matrix survey and I've arbitrarily inserted the name of a fictitious classroom in the form. Flashlight could generate dozens or hundreds of such forms, each asking about a different learning space, and send each form only to those faculty who'd used that particular learning space. Please send comments to Steve Ehrmann at ehrmann @ tltgroup.org.

Designing your own evaluative survey

For surveys or focus groups evaluating current learning spaces, you might want to use a sequence of questions like this:

1. What teaching/learning activities are most important for you? (give them an initial menu; you could draw on our web site for such an initial list)

2. For one of those activities, do you (a respondent to this survey or interview, or a member of this focus group) think this is an important activity (if not, go to the next activity)

3. Have you tried this activity in the space we're evaluating?

4. What aspects of this space make it easy, inviting, and rewarding to do this activity?

5. Are there are elements of this institution, or your own background, that make it easy, inviting, and rewarding to do this (here)?

6. What aspects of this space make it awkward, difficult, time-consuming, or unpleasant to do this activity here?

7. Are there other elements of this institution, or your own background, that discourage you from doing this activity here? or make the activity less successful than it might otherwise be?

8. What's the best space (physical or online) at this institution to do this activity? How is that space better than this space?

9. Now that you've thought about it, what would be an ideal space for doing this?

10. What other changes in the institution, your training, etc would make it as easy, inviting, and rewarding as possible for you to do this activity?

Course management systems support the creation of certain types of virtual (online) learning spaces.  Click here to see a guide to using faculty and student surveys to gather the kinds of evidence that can help a university see how to improve learning with its course management system.