How will university campuses change post-pandemic?

In much the same way that the transition to work from home has caused corporations of all sizes to dig deep to understand the high value tasks that occur most successfully when teams gather in person, higher education may soon be shifting its campus model in response to the integration of virtual learning into its ongoing pedagogy.

Online education has been evolving for more than a decade, from the early days of MOOCs – massive open online courses initially sparked by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project – to the emergence of digital first institutions (University of Phoenix and Southern New Hampshire University best known among them).

And much like the hybrid model (with a mix of digital classes and in-person discussion groups) that has come to the forefront during this period, we can expect that even when campuses can operate normally, some virtual learning is going to be here to stay.

Long before the current pandemic forced a change in learning modes, professors had already begun to record lectures for easy download and to focus in-person learning on discussion and other activities best conducted when students can interact in smaller groups.

Students appreciate the on-demand nature of asynchronous, digital lectures (which have the benefit of being able to be listened to at 1.5 speed!); but they crave a deeper connection to the content.

Learning spaces that foster smaller clustered conversations, creating a landscape where students of all types are encouraged to interact with classroom material, will meet that need. This period of restricted activity has only reinforced how critical such conversations are to the learning experience.

Creative collisions and innovation

At the same time, the fast-moving dynamics of the broader world of scientific research, business and social change have demonstrated how critical interdisciplinary, hands-on models are to responding to challenges and opportunities in a global landscape.

This generation of middle- and high-school students, who have now spent an entire year learning in a pandemic, may be more eager to explore sciences and technologies that enable change, moving beyond the in-person lab-based sciences to virtual communications, remote manufacturing and other digitally based disciplines.

Once again, colleges had begun to address this shift, with greater investments in updated life science, technology and prototyping (maker) spaces.

The incidental creative collisions and happy accidents of collaboration across disciplines are a highly valuable part of innovation. Higher education learning spaces will increasingly be designed to foster these interconnections – for example, bringing philosophy majors into discussion spaces with research scientists, artists into studios with engineers, future teachers into connections with business students.

What has been missing, to date, is a full integration of all of these factors to foster and take full advantage of opportunities for creative collisions. An enduring lesson of the pandemic is that proximity is imperative for innovation, collaboration and strategic thinking.

This intersection of students and disciplines will naturally extend beyond traditional classrooms; particularly in the next several years, when physical space may become a hot commodity, the trend of integrating living and learning spaces will accelerate.

From campus to neural network

Historically, most university campuses have organised themselves around a yard or a quad – often with imposing, opaque and monumental buildings surrounding that yard. This concept (and indeed the word campus) evolved from the Roman ‘campo’ (military training field, surrounded by officers’ tents) to the quiet, lush quadrangles that characterise many beloved campuses today.

But it is important to realise that model is based on a command and control structure. And, whether consciously or subconsciously, many of our campuses today more closely resemble military bases than dynamic, interactive cities. The Roman model may be a great way to organise resources to win a military campaign, but it is not the optimal model for today’s innovation-driven landscape.

What does this mean for college campuses? Think of the university of the future not as a campus, but rather as a neural network. It is connected. Buildings are closer together, streets are more dense, spaces are more compact and active. This increased proximity creates a much better neural network than the traditional campus plan that features separate buildings housing separate disciplines, spaced far apart around large open spaces.

The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts – known both for its traditional quads and its innovative science and technology network in Kendall Square – is a perfect example of where the campus model may go in the future.

A heatmap depicting construction dollar volume by address of building permits over the past decade would illustrate that the educational and learning institutions in Cambridge are concentrating their capital investment in tight clusters rather than spread out evenly among all their land holdings.

What does that urban model mean? If we take a lesson from the most successful cities, we see that planners are moving away from a zoned district model – office in one district, lab in another, housing in a third, shopping and entertainment in a fourth – and into a fully integrated approach.

A mixed-use environment

In the future, campuses will not segregate learning spaces from residential and recreational spaces. The mixed-use environment that is key to dynamic urban neighbourhoods will be replicated in the ‘mini city’ that functionally makes up most closed campuses. The key will be not just jumbling the uses together to see what happens, but intentionally redesigning the campus model to continue to maximise the factors that we know foster those neural networks.

The central quad has long been a beloved space on most campuses. But it is time to imagine a different model that creates countless small moments of interaction, pulling people together instead of spacing them apart.

John H Martin, fellow of the American Institute of Architects, is a principal at Elkus Manfredi Architects, USA.