Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

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Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

1/20/2005

By Dian Schaffhauser

As an example, she points to outsourcing. “We outsource the bookstore... The sacred cow of outsourcing—teaching—has already been broached. They just haven’t called it outsourcing... When we started the community college system, colleges and universities were saying, ‘OK, we’re wiling to outsource the first two years. We’re willing to leave basic general education to another educational entity.’ Part of where [schools will] end up going with outsourcing will depend on how much emotional attachment they perceive their alumnae have with the college or university owning that function.”

She envisions consortia forming, not just among colleges, but among other entities too. “A college might partner with a K-12 school district and they might share technology, or they might share outsourcing in a way that leverages their power, because now they’re bigger,” she says. “We can’t really afford to have a program—at a 1,000-person small, private liberal college—in quantum physics. What agreements are we going to have with Huge U down the road?”

Behind the Scenes: Sustainability Will Influence Planning

Sustainability will define campuses of the future, just as it affecting them today. Thirty years of environmental thinking has permeated most students’ consciousness, says SCUP’s Phyllis Grummon. “So you get to college and you expect that there will be a place to put paper for recycling, that if you don’t have a bottle return policy, there will be a place next to the soda machine where you can toss in your empties for recycling.”

Besides the push from students for sustainable practices, environmental compliance and economic conditions are re-enforcing the tendency to sustainability at schools. “The Environmental Protection Agency has started regulating campuses,” Grummon points out. “For many years, they pretty much ignored what went on on campuses. Now they show up and say things like, ‘This parking garage is a little too close to the river on campus.’ Or, ‘Oh, this chem lab has quite a few drums of materials stored in the wrong place.’”

She says more and more campuses are also seeking LEED certification from the US Green Building Council. Although it’s focused on individual buildings right now, “the next step is having campus planning and master planning look at, How do I LEED-certify a campus? How do I look at the water runoff from a parking in a way that recovers it to be recycled into the cooling of our nuclear reactor?

Another shift Grummon foresees: “Six years will seem like a short time to get your bachelor’s degree at some point—because you will work, go to school, work part time and go to school full time, and just the opposite,” she says. “We’ll become accustomed to people not really having their professional credentials until their mid-20s.”

As part of that trend, distance learning will become even more popular because it can deliver asynchronous learning. “That’s a case where, ‘Ah, I got scheduled to work this morning. So I’m going to catch my Psych 101 class [online] this afternoon.’ [It’s like saying] ‘I’m going to Tivo it,’ in essence.”