The Learning Landscape Dimensions: The Supply and Student Preferences on Campus Premises

This dissertation examines a university campus as a complex socio-technical system, founded on the assumption that the campus and its use have transitioned into representing the ideals of the Learning Landscape approach. Over the last decades, universities have responded to the many societal changes by developing their facilities. With the aims towards cost savings and synergies between stakeholder groups, these developments have both called for and led to new forms of shared and flexible use of spaces that challenge the traditional design guidelines. Consequently, the entire campus accommodates students’ learning activities. However, the Learning Landscape approach and its dimensions have not been previously investigated in a real-life campus entity, which is surprising given the global investments and developments on campus premises.

The purpose is to advance the Learning Landscape discussion by investigating the extent to which a campus represents the ideals by describing its supply and preferences on spaces and their mutual relationship. The focus is on the student perspective, as it is often underrepresented in user-driven design processes. The main aim is to define the dimensions of the campus Learning Landscape from the sharing viewpoint to benefit the design and development of campus environments and learning spaces. This dissertation is one of the first to examine an entire campus entity in three scales, i.e., buildings, clusters and spaces, by comparing the supply with preferences. Thus, this research critically examines learning spaces’ conceptualisations and underlying assumptions.

The monograph focuses on a critical single-case campus study and investigates it in a mixed-method manner through an inductive and deductive reasoning cycle. First, the Learning Landscape approach and its dimensions are reviewed based on theory and learning space literature, which the three empirical studies further explore in depth. The first empirical study describes the campus entity and its supply of learning spaces from the viewpoints of sharing, pedagogy, and use. This study defines the related key aspects, formulates a typology of shared learning spaces and investigates the supply’s distribution and the (adaptation) status. The second empirical study illustrates the student preferences on the supply and defines the related main quality dimensions. The third empirical study evaluates the preferred campus locations in three scales by comparing the supply of spaces with the preferences. Finally, the literature review findings are combined with the findings of the empirical studies.

The data consists of literature, computer-aided design (CAD) created plan drawings, location-based Soft-GIS questionnaire open and closed responses, observations of on-site visits, and Justified Plan Graphs. The studies utilize qualitative and quantitative content analyses conducted in CAD-drawing software ArchiCAD, qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti and quantitative data analysis software Microsoft Excel.

As a main scientific result, this research formulates a novel framework, a Sharing- Based Campus Learning Landscape Model. With this dissertation’s empiric findings, the Model is further developed into a Design and Development Matrix incorporating spatial and user-driven aspects to illustrate the entity. As a main practical result, it presents refined dimensions of campus Learning Landscape to support their learning space evaluation, participatory design, and development of campuses.

Based on the findings, this dissertation argues that the transformed campus is a Sharing-Based Learning Landscape that is community-driven, accessible, flexibly used, versatile, and distributed and nested network of places. The research contributes to the learning space literature by questioning underlying conceptualisations and defining the key analysis factors and related scale measures, the typologies of shared learning spaces and clusters, and the levels of sharing in the campus context. Its methodological contribution includes employing the Soft-GIS-based preference survey on the campus supply. The dissertation also statistically examines the students’ preferences on the campus over other learning landscape places and the extent of the adaptations on campus. It contributes to the literature on students’ learning space preferences by defining the Main Quality dimensions for space use. Recommendations for future research include testing and comparing the approaches developed in this dissertation on other campuses, also from academic staff perspectives, and validating the approaches with more sophisticated quantifiable measures.