Transforming the Instructional Landscape: Student Needs in Classroom Design
Academic and Campus Events (ACE) recognizes that students and instructors require learning spaces that meet their needs. Creating such spaces requires understanding how students use classroom spaces and designing solutions that facilitate learning. To help develop this understanding, the Innovation Hub undertook a project as part of ACE’s “Transforming the Instructional Landscape” campaign.
Fall/Winter 2017-2018
What do students look for in classroom spaces?
TIL is a major classroom redesign initiative created by Academic and Campus Events (ACE), now called Learning Space Management (LSM). The Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation (CTSI) and the Innovation Hub are key partners in this initiative. In its initial year, TIL used human-centered methodologies to begin to understand the needs of students and instructors when it comes to learning spaces and their re-design. The focus of this first year of TIL was to understand how classroom spaces are used, and how spaces can be designed to facilitate learning. As part of this project, TIL developed various user personas to understand the unique needs and wants that users have when it comes to classroom spaces.
KEY FINDINGS
In this report, we identify three key themes from the project:
- Human-centered design: Human-centered design considers human needs that can be met through effective use of space. For example, classrooms can be designed to maximize comfort and collaboration with peers.
- Functionality and space: Classroom spaces should be adaptable. Students say they favour rooms with equipment that enables versatile use of the space. They believe this allows instructors to seamlessly transition from lectures to discussions.
- Aesthetics: Many students feel that working in the University of Toronto’s iconic buildings is a quintessential part of their university experience. They have fond memories that are tied directly to these spaces. Students want to spend more time in these historic buildings.
We also created questions and personas that tell students’ stories. Personas are used in the Design Thinking process to understand someone’s needs and experiences. They help guide ideation and ensure that the end product meets the needs of the target audience. The personas included in the report are characters created based on the information we gathered; they allow us to share student stories while maintaining anonymity.
