Reimagining Library Learning Spaces, or Risking Digital Piracy in Universities: Students Views on Spatial Boundaries, Time, and Self-Study Modalities in the Post-Digital Era of AI

This dissertation addresses the alignment of learning space with higher education learning and teaching. Significant changes in higher education the past decades, such as increased information and communication technology (ICT) and new learning theories have resulted in the dilemma whether higher education institutions can facilitate tomorrow’s learning and teaching in today’s or even yesterday’s school buildings. The objective of this dissertation is twofold. First, it explores the alignment of higher education accommodation with higher education learning and teaching developments. Second, it supports CREM decision-making to align learning spaces with the requirements that result from the developments in higher education. The main research question of the thesis is: Which aspects influence the alignment of learning space with developments in higher education learning and teaching? To address this question, five sub-questions were formulated (RQ1-RQ5), for which five studies have been conducted. These sub-questions fit relevant alignment issues in order to connect the demand and the supply side of higher education buildings. RQ1 aims to explore how higher education buildings match the developments in higher education learning and teaching. Next, RQ2 and RQ3 refer to identifying how managers, who are responsible for the supply side, act in line with these developments. The key aspect of RQ2 concerns the content of CRE strategies that are formulated to match corporate strategies. The key aspect of RQ3 is concerned with the process of managing alignment of supply with demand. Finally, RQ4 and RQ5 focus on investigating the alignment of higher education buildings specifically from the perspective of students as an important user group. RQ4 aims at the actual use of learning spaces by students, where RQ5 aims to study the students’ preferences for their physical learning environment. The five studies result in five research papers that are presented in the dissertation.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to share lessons already learned and work currently in progress from one higher education institution’s experiences of developing several flexible and technology-enhanced active learning spaces. It further proposes that the potential of such spaces can be more fully realised through the enactment of programmes of digital literacy development amongst their users.Design/methodology/approach– In identifying a convergence of profound challenges facing higher education and proposing that innovations in physical learning spaces are one approach to addressing such challenges, the paper examines a number of institutional policies and initiatives for rethinking and redesigning several physical classroom environments. It sets internal findings and position statements amidst a broader context of relevant field literature.Findings– The paper provides insights from several years of experience in higher education learning space development, including the benefits of iterative experimentation, the consultative role of a multi-stakeholder specialist group, the challenges of balancing pedagogic need with often conflicting institutional requirements and the value of varied programmes of staff development.Originality/value– This paper’s insights will be of value to individuals and institutions engaged in reconsidering their provision of physical classroom spaces in higher education and to those promoting the effective use of learning spaces in the digital university.

Buildings contribute in crucial ways to how students experience learning spaces. Four schools within a faculty (nursing, nutrition, occupational and public health, and midwifery) moved into a new Health Sciences building Fall of 2019. This new building created a unique opportunity to explore the intersection between higher education and learning space design, informed by concepts of space and place, and students' profession specific and interprofessional learning experiences in a new Health Sciences building. A qualitative descriptive design was used. All undergraduate and graduate students within the four schools were invited to participate. Focus groups were undertaken to gain a rich understanding of students' experiences and views of their space and place of learning. Data collection involved focus group data from profession specific participant users and interprofessional participant users. Inductive thematic analysis of focus group transcripts generated an initial coding scheme, key themes, and data patterns. Codes were sorted into categories and then organized into meaningful clusters. A building planning development project document relating to the vision, intentions, design, and planning for the new building provided content from which to view the study findings. The study data contributed to the conversation about space and place and its influence on higher learning within specific intraprofessional and interprofessional student groups and provided insight into the process of actualizing a vision for a new learning space and the resultant experiences and perceptions of students within that space/place.

Effective teaching and learning in higher education are often restricted because of the nature of available learning spaces. Both the planning and the use of learning spaces needs careful attention. Contributions from architects, users, educationists and students can be helpful in formulating decisions regarding the physical facilities for presenting information, for teacher‐student interaction and for other learning activities considered desirable in higher education.

Through the lens of sensory affect, this book offers a new way of thinking about day-to-day teaching and student engagement within learning spaces in design education. The book examines the definitions, concepts, ideas, and overlaps of a repertoire of learning spaces prevalent in higher education and addresses the pedagogical gap that exists between broader learning structures and spaces, and the requirements of specialist design education. Recognising that mainstream teaching environments impact upon design studio learning and student engagement, the book positions creative learning spaces at the heart of practice-based learning. It defines the underlying pedagogical philosophy of a creative learning space in design education and reports on how practical strategies incorporating sensory affect may be implemented by educators to foster better student engagement in these spaces within higher education. Bringing much-needed attention to specialist design teaching and learning spaces in higher education, this book will be of interest to educators, researchers, and post-graduate students immersed in design education, pedagogy, and learning spaces more broadly.

This Special Issue was conceived and developed following a series of international conferences held in Asia, with a particular focus on critically reflecting upon higher education development in the region from broader social and political economy perspectives. Some of the papers in this Special Issue were selected from presentations in the East Asia Social Policy (EASP) Research Network Conference successfully held in Taiwan in 2018, while others were chosen from international events held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong presenting critical reviews and reflections on internationalization, marketization and graduate employment of higher education in Asia. This introductory article puts the discussions of the selected papers in this issue in context, with critical reflections on the key issues being examined in these papers. The Special Issue is published when the world is still confronting the unprecedented global health crisis resulted from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article discusses the higher education development trends in Asia through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system and examines how these development trends are affected by the COVID‐19 crisis.

This chapter explores the visual representations of high school learning spaces as imagined by some Year 6 students in their final year of primary school in Queensland, Australia. Their images and interview responses reveal five key spatial attributes concerning high school learning spaces. Connections to nature, open spaces that were sustaining and promoted thinking, spaces that enabled them to be active and make choices were clear preferences evident in student responses. These responses highlight how physical, emotional and social wellbeing factors were integral to their ideal spaces for learning. The chapter will also consider the implications for students, educators and designers regarding issues of control, consultation, critique and compromise in thinking about the design and use of learning spaces.

In response to various institutional and national policy drivers (University College Cork, 2018; Department of Health, 2019), a community-based dental education (CBDE) initiative in a non-dental setting has been proposed as a new curriculum offering in Paediatric Dentistry in University College Cork. The student-led clinic for children aged 0-5 years will be located in a new primary healthcare centre, which serves as a community hub for health and wellbeing services. The innovative use of learning spaces to imbue a culture of community-engaged scholarship in higher education is widely encouraged (Campus Engage, 2014; Galvin, O’Mahony, Powell & Neville, 2017). This work seeks to explore the features of the proposed learning environment, which may impact upon teaching and learning practice.

With technological innovations happening at workplaces, 21st century organizations demand competencies in thinking creatively and critically. These two skills will potentially help prospective employees become confident individuals, concerned citizens, self-directed learners, and active professionals. In this context, it becomes imperative to overhaul the lecture-based and banking model of the traditional pedagogical approach in order to impart such skills among undergraduate and graduate students. To address this issue, a lab-based teaching-learning method focused on problem-solving and design thinking was introduced at OAMK Labs in Finland. This study assesses the efficacy of lab-based learning in enhancing creativity and critical thinking among students from engineering, management, and science backgrounds of Kathmandu University, Nepal. The study was conducted in a workshop setting using a randomized control trial (RCT) where participants were divided into control and treatment groups. Participants in treatment group took part in a design thinking workshop that applied lab-based learning pedagogy, while those in the control group were given some reading material on improving creativity and critical thinking. Standard tests on both critical and creative thinking in a pre- and post-stages were administered to both groups. Data was analyzed using standard Difference-in-Differences technique. The results showed that while the level of critical thinking improved significantly, among the learners in treatment group alone, the creativity level in the post-stage increased significantly among learners in both groups. Results validated the efficacy of lab-based teaching-learning in addressing the need for critical and creative thinking skills among learners. Keywords: critical thinking, creativity, lab based learning, innovation, higher education, Difference-in-Differences

Learning space research is a relatively new field of study that seeks to inform the design, evaluation and management of learning spaces. This paper reviews a dispersed and fragmented literature relevant to understanding connections between university learning spaces and student learning activities. From this review, the paper distils a number of core concerns and identifies some gaps in the literature. One of its primary goals is to clear the ground for the construction ofmodelsof learning space that can be used by the various parties involved in the design and evaluation of new learning spaces: teachers, architects, interior designers,ITmanagers, educational leaders and students. A closely related goal is to help those participating in learning space research locate and understand each other's contributions. Fragmentation in research related to learning and physical spaces makes progress in the field slow. Our review makes two passes over the field: drawing together research from architecture, the learning sciences, environmental psychology, human computer interaction and elsewhere to identify research foci and gaps, and then also capturing some work by learning space researchers that directly attempts to model the main relationships in the field. The paper ends with a summary of implications for research and practice.

In response to the rapidly changing realities of higher education, educators need to reconceptualise how they think about learning spaces. This paper examines how the concept of connected learning space may better represent the learning experiences of postgraduate students than paradigms of physical and/or virtual space. Eleven focus groups, representing as many postgraduate courses in a large business school, were analysed to gather insights into how students conceptualised their learning spaces. Students described their experiences as personal, interconnected learning spaces that extended beyond the formal educational environments designed for them. These findings reveal an entangled network of connections with multiple dimensions: interactions with peers, engagement with formal course materials and self-sourced digital content, links to their past learning experiences and envisioned future selves, as well as connections to professional practice in the ‘real world’. We argue that higher education institutions and educators need to co-design with students to strengthen connections between theory and practice, between individual and collective experiences, both within and outside formal educational spaces. Educational design must facilitate diverse opportunities for students to co-create meaningful connections that transcend physical and virtual boundaries.

Learning spaces in higher education are changing in crucial and myriad ways. It is important to know how learning spaces are associated with learning in order to provide students with the most appropriate spaces to learn. This study investigates the relationship between students’ learning patterns and learning spaces in higher education through empirical work. It was divided into two phases – firstly, it selected two contrasting learning spaces in a Chinese university and used an adapted Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) to compare how students went about their learning differently within the spaces. In the second stage, students were recruited to participate in focus group interviews, in which they were asked about their learning experiences of, and attitudes towards, the spaces. Quantitative and qualitative data were combined and analysed in order to identify patterns of covariation that related to features of students’ learning patterns and preferences for learning spaces. The findings revealed that students with features of a typical application-directed learning pattern preferred flexible, innovative learning spaces; students who showed characteristics of a reproductive learning pattern considered traditional, didactic learning spaces as desirable or necessary; and students who adopted more strategies of a meaning-directed learning pattern placed less emphasis on the importance of space as they tended to choose different types of learning space according to their own learning needs. Implications for further research and practice of learning spaces in higher education, as well as the generalisability of the findings, are discussed.

The multiple crises of unsustainability are provoking increasing stress and unpleasant emotions among students. If higher education is to fulfill its mission to support transformation processes toward sustainable development, it must adapt its pedagogical approaches to help students deepen their critical thinking and empower them to engage in these transformation processes. For this reason, emotions – which can also prevent critical thinking – should be carefully addressed within transformative learning journeys. However, these journeys are themselves challenging for learners and educators. They push them to abandon stable meaning perspectives, causing feelings of incoherence and tension. Learners need safe enough spaces to navigate these situations of uncertainty. The central questions of this manuscript are: What is meant by safe enough spaces? How can learners, educators, and higher education institutions create and hold such spaces? These questions are explored on three different levels: (1) the intrapersonal level, (2) the interpersonal level, and (3) the organizational and systemic level of discourses in higher education. For the intrapersonal level, perspectives inspired by neurobiology are used to discuss reaction patterns of our autonomous nervous system and present insights into stress development. Learners should feel bodily safe when engaging in transformative learning processes. This is supported by balancing the challenges learners face with the resources they have. For the interpersonal level, the manuscript argues that focusing solely on rational discourse is insufficient to support safe enough spaces for transformative learning. We call for a culture of edifying conversations supported by respectful relationships among learners, as they are more adequate for regaining self-direction. For the organizational and intertwined systemic level, the ambition is followed to make higher education institutions offer learning environments that feel safe enough for all involved. However, as these institutions are strongly influenced by dynamics of economization and competition, they do not necessarily empower learners to challenge and disrupt unsustainable and neoliberal discourses. The manuscript explores how learners and educators can cultivate engaged critique by acknowledging their own embeddedness in neoliberal dynamics and opening up so-called transformative spaces for institutional change. Finally, recommendations for educational practices in higher education for sustainable development are offered.

The paper contributes to the study of correlation between critical and creative thinking as the twenty-first century skills vital to succeed and stay competitive in the modern Information Age. The aim of the research is to ground a possibility of facilitating creativity with the help of critical thinking. The concepts of creative thinking and critical thinking are analysed. A synergetic correlation of creativity and critical thinking, with mutual reinforcement of both, is argued. Critical thinking is getting more innovative character, while creativity is raising to a higher level with more realistic results. To investigate the mechanism of reaching a creative result through critical thinking, original Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives and learning behaviours was compared with its revised version of 2001. It was highlighted that both versions of the taxonomy presuppose that critical thinking skills complement and reliably enable the creation of innovative ideas and new realities. The revised version recognizes and emphasises the creativeness of the critical thinking and, vice versa, the necessity of critical judgments in creating new products. The relevance of critical thinking skills for the development of creativity was considered with the help of an integrative model of critical and creative thinking proposed by L. Combs, K. Cennamo, and P. Newbill. It illustrates that critical and creative thinking overlap when it goes about the generation and refinement of ideas – at the level of high-order thinking processes, according to B. Bloom’s taxonomy. The article argues that collaboration of critical and creative thinking starts even earlier – namely, at the stage of setting a target for innovation, collecting information, interpreting and applying it – and continues throughout the entire path of constructing an innovative idea, its reflective evaluation and practical implementation. That is, critical thinking ensures self-regulation of creative thinking at all stages of creative activity and serves as a methodological tool of the creative process. It is concluded that application of critical thinking to creativity leads to better-grounded decisions, unbiased attitudes, more innovative solutions and higher quality deliverables.

Space is a significant factor for teaching and learning (Goodyear & Carvalho, 2019), but it is comparably underexplored in the higher education (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016). Learning spaces have become hybrid in the post-pandemic period in higher education with physical locations having digital extensions and vice versa (Ellis & Goodyear, 2018), which allows more flexible study modes and access to richer study resources. In addition to having material properties which physically promote or prevent student engagement, space is also a social product with relational and structural aspects, which could shape social relationships and moreover, reflect or promote existing inequalities amongst students (Wong, 2024). Space may therefore impact on students’ learning experiences, including within feedback encounters. Feedback is a significant aspect of students’ learning experiences in higher education. It is well acknowledged that feedback is important for students’ learning and graduate outcomes (Hattie & Clarke, 2018). Feedback encounters, such as supervision meeting and placements, could provide valuable feedback opportunities with the characteristics of immediate and frequent dialogues. However, spatial factors could affect these feedback encounters positively and negatively (Gravett, 2022). For example, many students perceive academic office as a scary space to seek feedback (Gravett & Winstone, 2019) while in comparison, online discussion boards are perceived as more flexible and equitable spaces for feedback engagement (Zhou et al., 2023). Since little is known about students’ experiences of feedback spaces and how spatial factors affect feedback, it is important to explore students’ feedback experiences in the hybrid feedback spaces. International students are a cohort for whom feedback spaces are particularly important. They often experience relocation to the new learning spaces in different cultural contexts, and are likely to be unfamiliar with material and social perspectives of the spaces (Dai et al., 2018). Therefore, they might feel disrupted and anxious at the initial stages of their feedback encounters, which could lead to the effectiveness of these valuable feedback. Since international students make great social and economic contributions to Australia, to promote more equitable feedback experiences for those students, it is important to understand their feedback experiences in the feedback spaces, to inform co-design of inclusive and supportive feedback spaces. This poster will offer an overview of preliminary findings of a review study. The review has two research questions: 1. How has space has been incorporated as part of existing feedback models in higher education, across situated, hybrid, and digital learning situations? 2. How do feedback models account for the particular situations of international students? This work has implications for future theoretical and empirical studies about feedback and feedback spaces. This research has the potential to enrich theoretical understandings of feedback and space research in higher education. Findings from this study could also enrich the literature regarding international students and provide practical strategies for supporting international students’ acculturation. In addition, the study could give implications to education institutions about how to create inclusive and supportive hybrid learning environments, which could significantly enhance the student experience and learning outcomes.