Xavier - a new build with a radical approach

First session I attended this morning was about Xavier University's new learning commons (87,000 square feet of it!), which opens this summer and hopefully will provide some useful insights for our new build at the Cambridge campus.

There is a website with lots of info about the project, including a video and a live web-cam of the construction site here http://www.xavier.edu/hoffquad

The session started off with the good old "digital-natives" numbers, complete with obligatory personal example of offsprings learning style ...

Xavier started by looking at the demographic mix of students and the anticipated changes into the future to try and assess what changing needs might be. "Developing and strengthing the student experience" was a key objective of their strategic plan. They are 90% tuition fees driven and recruiting and retaining students is a top priority.

The project was $108m in total - 3 buildings - utility plant, residence hall and new learning commons, which goes live this coming summer.

Key questions they started with:

- what resources and services do 21st century learners need
- What service models best support contemporary teaching and learning methodologies
- what organisational models are best suited for delivery of the servoices
- What facilities will best support these service and organisational models

Gosh! - refreshing to see these kind of questions being asked up front rather than considered as an after thought. Their Steering Committee for the project spent a lot of time considering these questions and challanging 'sacred cows' - which they now feel was a critical success factor. Making compromises was an essential part of the processes.

Key answers to question 1. - students learn - more collaborativly, they form their own collaborative communities, technology is an embedded part of the experience, students want seamless, highly satisfactory and self-driven services. They don't want to deal with a person unless they really need value add, they want services now and on-line. Which went against some of the traditionally held views that the only good service is personal service.

They formed a new organisational unit called "Information Resources" which pulled together all the key services that were involved in delivering services to students -eg: IT, Library, student services, administration etc - Wow! in other words they restructured the organisations in order to ensure the new devleopment was a sustainable success!!!

There was a pulling together of all the Faculty based administrative and student services into a single unit called the Division of Academic Affairs. Within that they had a centre for student excellence which included learning development, academic advice, learning assitance, retention services, shared labs such as languages lab, maths lab and so on. In other words all the academic services that were previously shared across faculties. Also a centre for teaching excellence with an experiemental classrooms and learning studios with the associated support and research activities.

Within the Information Resources Centre they had an integrated student service for delivery and integrated service points which pulled together IT support, classroom support, library reference support to provide all techncial AND informational support including the library for ALL students and staff. Looks like real integrated 1st line delivery - this is currently running as a prototype - "it's for the most part harmonious on good days!" - so obviously still some issues.

One key thing is that there was a LOT of discussion and planning about the space and how it should be used and for what - including all the design - long before they commissioned the building. There was whole organisational support and involvement in the project. A key success factor was bringing faculty and academic staff together as early as 2001 to start thinking collectivly about what they wanted in 2011!

The question - what is learnign and teaching going to look like was answered before thinking about what sort of space do we need. They saw elsewhere that without doing this buildings end up "getting in the way" of what you want to do. In 2006 they then started to think about the types of building, square footage and all the other initial planning issues.

The architects they chose also had an open-space collaborative working environment for their own staff and they had done a lot of research on learning spaces in HE.

The Information Resources Centre provided a connection both physically and in terms of service delivery between the Library and the Information Commons.

They spent A YEAR on the detailed process of design and layout of spaces, furniture etc through multiple phases before they got it right. They also trialed different layouts in small areas elsewhere as prototype spaces to see how they worked. In the prototypes they did exercises like mapping where all the furniture and resources on wheels (smartboards etc) where in the space at the beginning of the week and then mapping them again at the end of the week to see how much they were moved around. This gave good data on usage. If they aren't moved much then maybe you don't need mobile units.

Lots of mixed spaces in the new building, social spaces as well as more regimented rows. The new staff spaces in the Centre for Teaching Excellence includes a large faculty lounge which looks much like open learning spaces for student - mix of social and collaborative work spaces for staff too.

The building is under construction at the moment and due to open this Summer. They offerred an open invitiation to go and visit when it's open.

Students were heavily involved in the project from the start and student engagement was viewed as critical.

I asked a question about the level of organisational and cultural change that they achieved in terms of succesfully delivering genuinly integrated services and whether they thought they could have achieved it if they hadn't spent 10 years in the thinking and planning. The response was that it did take a very long time to get the collaborative working and to build the trust necessary to achieve an agreed restructure around newly designsed services. It meant bringing together areas that had never worked together before and "there was a LOT of talking for a long time" in the early years before there was any real planning or action.

It's a radical approach to delivering genuinly integrated services, but it shows that it can be done - and it's great to see not just innovative thinking but innovative and radical action to solving these issues.

Key learnings:

- Start early
- Long before you think about the building itself focus on what the needs of stare going to be in the future and what it is you want to deliver
- Design the services first and then if necessary restructure organisational units to deliver them. It is NOT about co-location of existing services, but creation of new fit-for-purpose integrated service.
- True integration requires genuine collaboration and trust and that takes time, a LOT of time.