Latest Reports

A hands-on, interactive, and problem-oriented approach to learning is taking campus planning and design by storm, focused on equipping students with the skills they need to tackle near-term and future challenges globally. Increasingly, universities are recognizing students’ desire to connect their educational experience with real-world applications, and “maker spaces” provide that intersection. They also appeal to big industry and help to connect students with job opportunities, particularly in STEM fields.

The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) is designing new facilities to respond to the experiential, project team-based learning paradigms set forth in today’s cross-disciplinary agenda for science, technology, engineering, and math. With one new construction and a renovation project underway, TCNJ hopes to reap the same benefits realized at other institutions, which experienced increased applicants, enrollment, and STEM majors, as well as more effective pedagogies and greater research output.

Space allocation can be a political minefield, but Stony Brook University School of Medicine (SBM) is changing that paradigm. Old-style backroom negotiations are being replaced with a wholly transparent decision-making approach that utilizes information technology to democratize space allocation and provide department chairs with an unprecedented wealth of information about their space and staffing, past, present, and future.

Colleges and universities across the US are struggling to provide necessary STEM-focused learning and research environments in facilities that were constructed decades before an acronym was created to unify the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Institutions are addressing this concern by creating comprehensive, vision-driven plans to identify the facility renovation, construction, and repurposing required to meet their objectives.

The University of Saskatchewan has renovated and modernized its health sciences education and research facilities to accommodate shared operations, space, and technology, using change management strategies to help faculty, staff, and students move from silos to a team-based model. The transformation incorporates institutional, as well as physical, changes, including restructuring established administrative processes and hierarchies.