LSC Vision:

That all 21st century undergraduates, no matter their background or career aspiration, have ready access to physical learning environments that enable them to become engaged learners:

• Constructing their own learning, actively involved with cooperative, problem-driven teams
• Communicating and collaborating with peers and colleagues, formally and informally, face-to-face and virtually
• Connecting their campus-based learning experiences to real-world opportunities and challenges
• Celebrating as members of a robust 21st century community of learners.

The physical environment that serves such a vision is one that provides undergraduates opportunity to acquire the skills, capacities, depth of knowledge, and self-awareness that prepare them for their future responsibilities as engaged members of the 21st century workplace, engaged citizens of a free society.

The cultural environment that serves such a vision is one in which there is a communal understanding of and commitment to goals for student learning across the campus, as well as a recognition that building community is both means and end of the process of planning spaces for learning.

LSC Goals:

The primary goal is:

• To inform the work of campus planning teams with responsibility for shaping, maintaining and renewing undergraduate learning environments—whether the focus be remodeling a single classroom; recycling an out-dated library; renovating for interdisciplinary STEM learning and research; redesigning the landscape/greening the campus; imagining, designing, constructing, and maintaining a major new facility; developing/implementing a multi-year agenda for shaping formal and informal learning spaces campus-wide.

Toward that end, further LSC goals are to engage a broad community of stakeholders in:

• Promoting evidence-based design as a foundation for shaping and reshaping physical learning environments in colleges and universities across the country
• Supporting the design and development of physical learning environments that explicitly reflect awareness of research on how people learn
• Capturing emerging best practices for imagining, designing, contructing, renovating, and maintaining spaces for undergraduate learners
• Distilling and disseminating relevant resources as broadly as possible, connecting theory to practice.

LSC Strategy:

Our central strategy is to create and catalyze a feedback loop through which the broad community of stakeholders can: ask and respond to questions about all aspects of planning learning spaces, collaborate in exploring lessons learned from the community of experienced practitioners; advancing what is known about how the quality and nature of learning spaces affects the quality and nature of learning in the undergraduate setting.

LSC Feedback Loop: What we do
 

Vision, Goals & Strategies: A guide for planning learning spaces
A PKAL Learning Spaces Collaboratory Working Paper