DESIGN CRITERIA FOR LEARNING SPACES IN TECHNICAL INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

Awareness of the relationship between the educational and architectural design features and principles when planning new learning environments has escalated in the last few years. Not only should institutional buildings be durable and aesthetically pleasing, but they also need to be functional and fit for purpose. These trends are underpinned by a body of unique research. The research focuses on the way in which campuses have used resources for time, space and information communication technologies (ICT) to change the existing pedagogical model and teacher practices to a more student-centered approach. The increasingly diverse offering of global higher education effectively means that there is no single prescription or model which represents the learning environment (pedagogy and infrastructure) in the 21st century. Although not prescient at the start of the project, the need for a critical review of a campus offering is ever more important in the light of a reduced publicly funded higher education budget for the foreseeable future. Efficient and effective use of space can contribute nox only to an enhancement of the academic offering, but it can also contribute significantly to savings other than in the staffing budget. The dissertation sets out to explore current issues and trends in new approaches to the design and use of flexible technology-rich learning spaces in Higher Education, and to consider the implications of these for new generation institutions. The aim of the entire work is to conceptualize the future design of formal learning spaces, in order to facilitate the changing pedagogical practices needed to support a mass higher education system in technical institutions. Design criteria learning spaces in technical institutions looks at the relationship between campus planning and specific exemplary teaching and learning spaces in a set of new generation campuses. A key feature of the research is the way in which these exemplary spaces are integrated into an overall campus plan. Based on principles derived from the latest research in design and planning, the work looks at the way in which campus teaching and learning spaces and their master plans express the values and aspirations of the campuses within which they are sited. An extensive review was carried out in order to establish the background to the study and to begin to explore new approaches to the design of learning spaces. The dissertation has produced a series of case studies that reveal the manner in which these innovative teaching and learning spaces have been developed, with a particular focus on the various kinds of formal learning spaces, their role in the learning process and teaching styles adopted in each of them. The information acquired about these aspects provides knowledge about the design process that has been identified as a gap in the literature on pedagogy and the built environment. Visits were then made to selected institutes in India in order to observe new developments in learning space design and need assessment surveys on various aspects regarding learning spaces were also carried out. Interviews were also conducted with some of the key individuals involved in the design and use of the spaces. Learning spaces need assessment survey was intended to understand how pervasive the trend toward learning-centered space design is on campuses today and to understand their spatial quality which is crucial to a rich learning experience, and was designed to get the opinion from both the student and faculty community. Qualitative techniques are used to analyse the data collected. An analytical model developed for the entire process where at each stages the results make way to identify strategies on which the design criteria would be formulated. To develop specific criteria for design for formal learning spaces, strategies help to narrow our perspective to certain key ingredients that are most important to guideline formulation. Based on the pedagogy-space-technology-capacity nexus, the design criteria was developed for the learning precinct. The result of this work has established a set of principles that support and enhance the design and development of teaching and learning spaces. These principles include the importance of evidence based decision making, the need for student engagement, the significance of leadership, the necessity of role clarification, the establishing of appropriate management structures and the need to ground the design processes in an academic culture of debate and discussion. Principles of design are evaluated in a design application for a campus for the Indian Institute of Technology at Gandhinagar. The findings of this study can help to provide new institutes with a general indication of the sorts of things that it has got right in the design of its learning and teaching spaces. The study also offers suggestions for future evaluative research.