Introduction to Method l Key Teaching/Learning Activities and Examples of Spaces l Evaluating Learning Spaces l

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Here is a 10 minute narrated slideshow discussing the Flashlight approach for using evaluation to get more value from existing learning spaces and to figure out what sorts of new learning spaces might get best use by current staff and students.

The Flashlight approach can be applied to learning space evaluation:

• The educational value of a space is mainly determined by the teaching/learning activities that it supports, potentially and actually. 
• Most spaces are under-utilized, i.e., faculty and students often don't realize that there are attractive, effective activities that could be carried out in that space, OR those activities are unnecessarily difficult or discouraged by the space or the ways in which its users are educated or supported.
• Therefore the value of almost any learning space can be increased if those barriers are identified, analyzed, and reduced.
• Those same kinds of inquiry into the matches and mismatches between goals, activities and spaces can help programs plan for renovations and for creation of new kinds of learning spaces.
• These kinds of evaluation and planning are much more likely to be effective if they are supported by an effective coalition: faculty, technology staff, faculty development staff, planners and architects, representatives of the offices that schedule facility, maintenance, and others.

Here is a survey designed to ask faculty about their ideal learning spaces. This is a first draft. Please send comments to Steve Ehrmann at ehrmann at tltgroup.org.

For surveys or focus groups evaluating a current learning space ((e.g., a classroom or a learning management system), you might want to use a a few questions like these, for discussion in groups and/or for surveys:

1. In an ideal learning space, one that would not get in the way of anything, or would make any teaching/learning activity easy, even with a large group of students, what would you do as a teacher? What would you want your students do in order to learn? (To stimulate their thinking, you might give respondents a set of such activities with examples of facilities that make them easy; you could draw on our web site for such activities and examples.)  Once you have a list of valued activities, ask the following questions about the first of those activities. Then ask about the second activity. And so  on.

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

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

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

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

6. 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?

7. Currently, what's the best space (physical or online) at this institution to do this activity? How is that space better than this space?

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

9. 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.

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