Abstract:

Many universities maintain campuses with multiple buildings, which are housing different faculty departments. Often the independent departments are in charge of the lecture halls and classrooms situated within their building. Hence, over the years a variety of audio-visual information technologies (AV-IT) and interior arrangements have been installed into the over three hundred teaching and learning spaces. Unfortunately such arrangements and applied projection systems dictate the pedagogy that can be applied therein, for instance a lecture hall with fixed tables and chalkboard can only facilitate frontal instruction.

In the last decade student numbers have grown drastically. Due to this massification lecturers have to be timetabled in larger halls located in other faculty buildings. As a result of such interchanges it became clear that our education spaces over the different buildings were divergent and often outdated. Moreover, problems arose because of different AV operation and teacher support resulting in delayed lectures and complaining staff.

Divergent systems and massification together with pressing developments, such as blended practices and flipped classrooms, confronted Delft University of Technology (DUT) with a situation that curricula are to be converted into active education practices but in outdated education spaces.

This very situation urged DUT to start streamlining the current lecture halls and classrooms in order to facilitate the education practices of tomorrow and to support those of today. A special workgroup Transforming Education Spaces is charged with classifying the required education spaces to facilitate sustainable education practices for today and tomorrow, with designing its appropriate technologies and arrangements, with mapping the current university situation, with composing a Cookbook Education Spaces and with proposing a transformation plan for the coming five years.

This paper describes how the Cookbook Educational Spaces came into existence, which content is addressed and how the multiple disciplines of pedagogy, interior design, construction, infrastructure, AV-IT and ergonomics have been working together.

Keywords:

Classification education spaces, streamlining education spaces, cookbook education spaces, audio-visual technologies, interior arrangements.