How to invest in campuses in a hybrid physical / digital world

Applying a frame of Time & Space to optimize capital investment and integrate physical and digital environments

Making the right investment choices in campuses is harder than ever

How do you, on a limited capital budget, make your campus a dynamic hub of activity when students, staff and visitors are less inclined to physically attend on a frequent or regular basis?

Thriving campuses require attractive environments

Face-to-face experiences of campus life are fundamental to the student and staff experience that most, if not all, universities want to provide

Larger, student focused university campuses in particular regard campus life as central to the experience they offer. Campus life is seen as central to creating a vibrant learning community, where students can engage deeply in their education beyond the classroom setting. This holistic engagement is vital to student success, as the university experience is not just about academic learning but also about personal development and networking opportunities.

For others, such as smaller rural campuses or small, narrowly focused discipline campuses, the physical campus infrastructure is critical to supporting student and staff success.

The digital environment is increasingly part of campus life and is the architecture of remote learning and work

Teaching methods and both academic and non-academic work are increasingly applying digital technologies. Digital technology has also enabled options for remote learning and work which provides many benefits including organizational resilience, access to larger and more diverse student and workforce talent pools, and improved productivity for some tasks.

Appealing, fit-for-purpose physical and digital environments are needed to attract and retain students and staff

Universities have been investing heavily in removing out-dated lecture theatres and creating flexible, ‘flat floor’ teaching spaces and a range of study areas that support new teaching methods and to promote collaboration. Substantial development of digital platforms to support online learning and community building have also been made. High quality environments are proven to increase human performance and encourage desired behaviours in both the physical and digital worlds.

Capital available for campus development is scarce

Universities are still dealing with the financial impacts of the pandemic, reduced international student volumes and a constrained funding environment. Capital investment decisions are made complicated by a number of factors:

• Infrastructure is expensive – and costs have been increasing
• The cost of capital is higher than in recent years
• Balancing the priorities of core operations (i.e. research and teaching) against critical enabling assets, and investing in new capabilities against necessary maintenance
• New infrastructure generates additional ongoing OPEX – be careful about the long run implications of new investments

Not investing is a non-option

Competition for students, the best academic and professional workforce talent, and industry partners means that campuses and digital technologies must be kept to a high and appealing standard.

Thinking clearly about activities in the dimensions of time and space can help

Activity Based Work has already changed work and study places

ABW compels clear thinking about the activities people undertake at work and study

Activity Based Working (ABW) has been around since the 1970s but has become commonly applied in the last decade. ABW recognizes that people perform a range of different activities during their day and are more productive when provided with the environments that suit performance of those tasks. ABW asks:

• What activities do people need to undertake at work / study?
• What physical environment do they need to do that optimally?
• How can that set of spaces be provided in the most efficient way?

Universities have invested in new learning and teaching spaces in recent years

Providing a range of appropriate, and flexible, spaces and environments has been proven to increase work productivity and satisfaction levels. Universities have invested extensively to replace old-style lecture theaters and study areas with more flexible learning spaces to allow for a range of learning and teaching formats including greater collaboration. Many workplaces have refurbished their office environments to accommodate new ways of working.

Extend Activity Based Work (ABW) by adding time and space

Exhibit 1 below outlines principles and examples for how to assign activities to:

• Where they are optimally undertaken
• When they are optimally undertaken

Time and space helps to activate and integrate physical and digital campuses

Clarify the roles of the digital and physical campus

By clearly identifying which activities happen on the physical campus and which in the digital campus, the role for each and how they can support each other to generate greater engagement and activity can be illuminated.

Use the physical campus to develop activity in your virtual community

• Build a strong virtual community for your on-site student and staff
• Know what about your physical assets / local capabilities are nation/world leading and promote these hard and engage with relevant virtual communities and distant potential collaborators/partners
• Identify your role in the local/regional community/industry and actively participate in relevant face-to-face and virtual forums.

Use the virtual community to draw activity onto your physical campus

• Use virtual community feedback to test and refine your unique physical campus attractors (i.e. capabilities, assets, event programming, service / experience offer)
• Visit key players in their location to strengthen relationships and encourage them to come to your location
• Host events to bring regional/world players to you
• Extend and deepen relationships with local stakeholders and refine and promote your physical offer to increase appropriate use of your physical facilities
• Embrace the virtual networks and distant collaborations to build scale and scope of activities and network / relational assets – use your unique differentiators to draw targeted visitation (type and volume) to your physical location.

Avoid developing ‘white elephants’ or more capacity than needed

Good infrastructure planning typically follows the steps of using activities to define the type of facilities needed and then applying staffing and student load forecasts to determine the volume of space required. Clear application of Time and Space activity mapping enhances this process by:

• Challenging and clarifying which activities require priority physical (on-campus) or digital (off-campus)) infrastructure
• Spreading demand and reducing peak capacity requirements: Wherever possible, distributing volumes across time and/or into lower cost &/or more flexible spaces / assets will reduce the size and cost of infrastructure which, at universities, is commonly built for peak loads and then lies under utilised for much of the year

Applying this approach can drive up ROI on campus assets

Campus investment and development should look different in the future than it does today