Page 20 - College Planning & Management, March 2019

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN THE HEALTH SCIENCES
Schools now face the challenge of trying to shoehorn modern curricula into traditional medical school environments such as lecture halls, formaldehyde-emitting dissecting rooms, and other static learning spaces from the past. This issue is particularly appar- ent within testing and evaluation spaces.
When it comes to testing, the identification of competencies, deter- mination of performance levels, and assessment can happen only in spaces that allow for impediment-free, direct observation and feedback via optimal cameras, microphones, and other AV capabilities. These environments serve an important role in medical training, but they also run the risk of being over- or underutilized, depending on lesson plans and evaluation schedules. When built as static environments, these costly and high-tech spaces also can become quickly outdated given the speed in which medicine and technology are changing.
Evolving Environments
In contrast, formative practice environments need not be confined by the need for such demanding technology and space constraints and should be able to adapt to the needs of different learners both during and after scheduled training hours. New flexible, interactive spaces bridge the divide between didactic theoretical learning and experien- tial, immersive learning modalities. These spaces need to be able to respond to conflicting demands and priorities between teaching and testing, large group and team-based instruction, and be hyper-flexible across all these education approaches.
University of South Florida’s (USF) Morsani College of Medi- cine and Heart Institute, a 320,000-square-foot facility now under construction in downtown Tampa, was designed to address evolving needs of today’s medical and health educator. The new facility ben- efits from USF Health’s nearby Center for Advanced Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) that provides the infrastructure for training, testing, and evaluation for both undergraduate and graduate medi- cal students. This allowed the Morsani College of Medicine to focus on other advanced models for undergraduate learning. The outcome is a hyper-flexible ecosystem of learning and support environments that work in multiple ways to build foundational and integrated health science and clinical science learning, develop team skills, and
enhance the wellness of the whole person.
The centerpiece of the new learning environment at Morsani is the
Experiential Learning Laboratory (ELL). Designed like a black-box the- ater, this immersive environment features movable, whiteboard panel walls and theatrical grid ceilings that allow the learning environment to flex to support a host of instructional needs including didactic, small- group, hands-on, physical demonstration and exam preparation. This flexibility also can be used to create round-robin workstations, enabling students to move quickly from one station to another. The intentionally “low-tech” design of these spaces means they are not beholden to any single type of teaching tool or hardware but instead can always accom- modate the latest simulation technology.
Elsewhere throughout Morsani, the school’s multimodal ap- proach to learning cycles students through spaces designed to push learning and experimentation with the ultimate goal of creating integrated thinkers. Flexible classrooms easily pivot from lecture to group-study spaces to large format interprofessional education sessions. Social communities and common areas offer students areas for individual study and rejuvenation (breakrooms, showers, lounges) after class or a long day of evaluations.
Inherent in all these design approaches is flexibility—the flex- ibility to address the following needs:
• The ever-changing nature of health care and the technology that
supports it.
• Evolving methodologies for medical learning, from didactic
instruction to experiential and interprofessional education. • The changing ways students choose how and when to study. • Maximizing the efficiency and use of facility space.
Tomorrow’s medical schools, faculty, and students may have an even greater list of needs than these. But that’s not a problem, provided the spaces we’re designing today have the flexibility to ac- commodateevolvingrequirements. CPM
Randy Kray, AIA, OAA, MAA, is HOK’s director of Science + Technol- ogy and has planned and designed advanced lab and technology facili- ties for clients around the world. Ami Shah is a senior lab planner who specializes in university science and medical facilities. Both work out of HOK’s Atlanta studio (www.hok.com).
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