FLEXspace: Building the Resource, Fostering the Community
A Q&A with Lisa Stephens
Over the New Year, CT visited with Lisa Stephens, the Senior Strategist for Academic Innovation in the Office of the SUNY Provost and Assistant Dean of the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She has guided FLEXspace.org as its Executive Director since its inception. The FLEXspace platform allows users to find and share detailed exemplars for learning space design and is of great value for institutions planning new or updated spaces. FLEXspace has evolved amid a growing community of higher education participating institutions, with the SUNY and California State University systems, Penn State, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District among its earliest and longest-term supporters. We asked Stephens about current and future developments in the FLEXspace platform and plans for its burgeoning community.
"Often times you need fresh eyes to envision solutions and add signature aesthetics. But when the core campus team of faculty, planners, and AV/IT folks are all in agreement on the basic parameters, it saves a lot of time, effort, and resources."
—Lisa Stephens
Mary Grush: Clearly FLEXspace is a great resource for those who are beginning new projects — but not everyone will start off as a FLEXspace power user! What are you doing to help people approach FLEXspace so they can get the most out of this rich tool?
Lisa Stephens: Hi Mary, Happy New Year! That's a great kick-off question! FLEXspace remains largely a community-driven effort, and we try to share as much as possible at conferences and webinars and respond to requests for mini-orientations on Zoom when campuses or organizations reach out to us. But like so many things in life, people seem to learn about FLEXspace "just in time" through word-of-mouth when their department, college, or campus starts gathering information for a new classroom build or renovation.
We strive to make the portal user-friendly for the three main groups of people who seem to need it most: facilities planners and architects; faculty, administrators, and learning space support folks; and the AV/IT integration staff. When launching the original site, we had a ton of help from friends in each of those roles, primarily from relationships built through CCUMC, AVIXA, EDUCAUSE, and SCUP — all of which really helped with making sure the terminology and key sections of the portal made sense to all the people who would be most responsible for contributing and reviewing the exemplars. And in the past couple years, we've really expanded the "how to" offerings — especially when the pandemic hit. FLEXspace became an important go-to place for people to share information about sanitizing spaces, room acoustics with faculty and students masked-up, and lots of other tips and tricks for hybrid/hyflex learning environments.
We strive to make the portal user-friendly for the three main groups of people who seem to need it most: facilities planners and architects; faculty, administrators, and learning space support folks; and the AV/IT integration staff.
Grush: What are some of the workshops or resources designed specifically to help institutions get started with their planning processes?
Stephens: We've developed and archived material largely from conference presentations, and we've created "how to" tutorial videos and job aids. This material is available both on the public Web site in the Blog and Getting Started sections, and within the Toolkit section in the portal.
I think what has our team most excited at the moment is the creation of the FLEXspace/Learning spaces Integrated Planning Pathway — we're thinking of calling it "FLIPP" for short. This iterative process was originally tried out while EDUCAUSE's Learning Space Rating System (LSRS) and FLEXspace were both under early development on a few campuses. We ultimately turned it into a step-by-step process to address the complexities of designing and building learning spaces. Of course, advisory groups can shape FLIPP to suit their needs.
I think what has our team most excited at the moment is the creation of the FLEXspace/Learning spaces Integrated Planning Pathway — we're thinking of calling it "FLIPP" for short.
In a nutshell, we recommend that once a project scope is identified — a room or rooms, a building, or even an entire campus — existing spaces can be scored using the LSRS to assess the organizational and physical factors that contribute to the space's potential efficacy. These LSRS scores help inform an advisory group, which can then prioritize efforts and begin using FLEXspace to benchmark and ideate from peer and aspirant campuses. Faculty, librarians and academic staff, and architects as well are familiar with these processes through existing accreditation needs.
The LSRS tools are all available and integrated into FLEXspace as a "one stop shop." But to be completely honest, we're still in the process of going through the Web site to make it easier to locate these resources. That's the downside of even a well-dedicated community effort: It's hard to stay on top of evolving information needs! We hope our reputation is user-friendly enough that people will just shoot us an e-mail if they are having trouble finding anything! The good news is that updates are underway.
Grush: Every institution is unique, but is there an optimal scenario for organizing your institution's faculty and staff right from the start of planning? And is there a productive way institutions can lay a lot of the ground work before bringing in outside consultants or designers?
Stephens: Wow! You just handed me an opportunity to talk more about the FLIPP process, and your question points to the original goal of FLEXspace: showing how to work with a really diverse group of smart, willing people who just need a little clear direction on the most effective way to build consensus-based recommendations for new spaces or renovations.
The objective is to get an advisory team on the same page before external consultants, vendors, or planners are brought in. It's really helpful to have everyone singing from the same music, albeit with different harmonies, on what pedagogical, facility, and budget needs are required before you start scenario-building with contractors. That's not to suggest that an advisory group should have their recommendations in place before talking with external consultants. Often times you need fresh eyes to envision solutions and add signature aesthetics. But when the core campus team of faculty, planners, and AV/IT folks are all in agreement on the basic parameters, it saves a lot of time, effort, and resources when executing a new project. It also helps greatly with post-occupancy assessment.
Expanding just a bit more on the FLIPP, if I may: What a gift the Learning Space Rating System has been, integrated with FLEXspace. In many ways, it's a gift of time. For example, you don't necessarily have to tie up staff time to evaluate spaces within the project scope. Spending a little time with a group of student assistants, running them through the LSRS criteria and evaluation spreadsheet should be enough.
What a gift the Learning Space Rating System has been, integrated with FLEXspace. In many ways, it's a gift of time.
The LSRS creators have suggested that the best use of this scoring tool is for internal benchmarking. Scores from nearly identical spaces may vary from campus to campus, but I'm pretty much convinced that they did such a good job writing the criteria that scores should hold fairly steady across institutions.
When aggregating scores across the project scope, it's easy to assume investment priority just by ranking the scores. But it's an incomplete picture to assume that low ranking rooms always need attention or upgrades before higher ranking rooms. The first step in the FLIPP process, obviously with a good, diverse group of advisors, is to ensure the campus registrar and an institutional analysis representative are included as part of the advisory team so they can report on the growth of popular program enrollment. That feedback can sway investment priorities both in terms of technology and renovation.
Everyone is busy — especially faculty being pulled in multiple directions — so it's really important to make a team's effort count. Once you've got the foundational LSRS data to work with, this is where your advisors shine: They can use their background discipline and expertise to search the FLEXspace collection and look for spaces with attributes that they really care about. The most rewarding part is when people with diverse points of view come back and find that many of the same spaces have gotten their attention.
Once you've got the foundational LSRS data to work with, this is where your advisors shine: They can use their background discipline and expertise to search the FLEXspace collection and look for spaces with attributes that they really care about.
Grush: What are some of the best new features of FLEXspace in the past year or so? What should institutions be aware of and be sure to utilize?
Stephens: In addition to the wonderful investment that EDUCAUSE made to integrate the new LSRS v. 3 into FLEXspace, the shared idea boards have had a big impact. The portal is robust enough that when a group of advisors each has an account, the lead facilitator can create a shared idea board inside the portal, to which each participant can tag and add their selected spaces. It's an easy way to see who's attracted to what spaces, and it really helps kick off conversations, whether you're Zooming together or meeting in person. We suggest using some guiding questions to help clarify the value of different spaces to the group. The bottom line is that the FLIPP planning process with idea boards enables an advisory group to make recommendations to senior executive leadership with really well-grounded rationale, and team members can easily build a presentation that can be shared internally, or even externally when working with contractors through the shared collaboration tools.
The bottom line is that the FLIPP planning process with idea boards enables an advisory group to make recommendations to senior executive leadership with really well-grounded rationale.
Grush: What are your goals in the next year or so, or even further on the horizon, in terms of future updates and improvements for the FLEXspace experience?
Stephens: It seems hard to believe that the custom portal was unveiled nearly four years ago! Since then we have continually gathered input about features and use cases from the community, and we have made a few adjustments to the portal. But of course, time marches on, as do technology upgrades and requirements. So we are now in the process of migrating the entire portal to a new version of the Drupal platform. This gives us a great opportunity to revisit portal performance and functionality, taking a closer look at what's working very well, or less well, and to stay in touch with how user needs are evolving. Of course a lot of us have the classic blood, sweat, and tears invested in this, and we're forever grateful to the sponsors and institutions which have supported — and continue to support — this effort for the past years.
We are now in the process of migrating the entire portal to a new version of the Drupal platform. This gives us a great opportunity to revisit portal performance and functionality, taking a closer look at what's working very well, or less well, and to stay in touch with how user needs are evolving.
We always love to hear from our user base on what's working well for them along with features they'd like to see added. For example, we know that many would like to ask questions or start a conversation thread around a particular space or spaces in the portal — and we hope to address that functionality with the portal migration.
As for additional, new cases that we're exploring, we know that some campuses are interested in leveraging FLEXspace as a classroom directory, perhaps even integrating it with their scheduling system. And several smaller architecture/design firms that are unable to provide a more significant 'partnership/sponsorship' contribution are interested in subscription-based portal access. We have conducted focus groups to clarify further the needs and expectations around these exciting new possibilities.
Grush: The ultimate success of FLEXspace is of course dependent on participation. After a challenging project, how do you get institutions to go the extra mile and post their experiences? What are the incentives to posting lessons learned, beyond the normal higher education characteristic we all know and love: the tendency of educators to share? Are you planning any new strategies to foster the FLEXspace community in terms of increased sharing?
Stephens: Obviously each campus competes for rankings and students, but the sharing ethos is grounded in wanting to better society through our combined efforts — which is what makes working in higher education so rewarding. Having recently worked through a large room renovation process, I can vouch for my colleagues' long hours and hard work and professionalism that spilled into evenings and weekends to ensure the campus could safely open this past fall. We all want our institutions to succeed.
Having recently worked through a large room renovation process, I can vouch for my colleagues' long hours and hard work and professionalism that spilled into evenings and weekends to ensure the campus could safely open this past fall. We all want our institutions to succeed.
Currently, as new spaces are added to the collection, they are displayed in upload order, so a space uploaded on Thursday will show up in front of a space uploaded the previous Tuesday. I think our user base knows this when they open the general collection, but you can also filter on recent additions as well as on a range of space attributes.
I'd like to work with our developers, our advisory board, and our FLEXspace community members, to find more prominent ways to reward the upload of spaces and toolkit resources. We planned a conference to launch an editorial board that would guide peer-based awards — "the FLEXIs" — but that rollout was delayed when the pandemic struck. The portal upgrade will re-drive that idea.
As one of our founding members has said from nearly Day One, "We need to find a way to make sure my boss understands that our campus is drawing positive attention as the result of these FLEXspace contributions." We can help by adding more data analytics features that track viewing "likes" and track trends so we can better inform research around the teaching and learning practices.
In the end, the success of FLEXspace is not just about a collection of pretty or impressive spaces — it's about how we use them in service of the students. And to achieve that, we must not only create a superb tool, but also build an ever more connected community.