Multi-campus learning arenas for student active learning in higher education: a somersault into the future

What will Higher Education look like in the future, 10, 20 or 50 years from now? The recent pandemic has propelled forward the digitalization process in Higher Education. International trends in educational policies testify to a shared responsibility in shaping future universities which are more interconnected, democratic, sustainable and accessible. Digital Teaching and Learning has become a strategic priority for widening university access and universities’ international outreach and cooperation. In Norway, distributed teaching and learning between different campuses is a highly relevant issue after a recent structural reform of the Higher Education sector (HE-sector). The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), for instance, is located in three different cities. As such, multi-campus teaching and learning has become a reality for many study programs. In this presentation, we share results from our research on student active learning in a multi-campus perspective. We have interviewed students from a joint international master in Music, Communication and Technology between NTNU and the University of Oslo. Our data describe students' experiences with multi-campus teaching and learning. Our results identify both challenges and solutions related to perceived equality and flexibility in multi-campus teaching settings. There is a long tradition that concentrates focus and resources in multi-campus projects on the implementation of technology solutions. Although technological innovation is necessary for future development, our results show that technology alone doesn’t necessarily lead to innovation and development in education. Technology has often been used to mirror and reproduce existing teaching practices into the digital domain, without yielding significant benefits. A parallel re-assessment of traditional pedagogical and didactic practices is therefore required. Hence, it is urgent to focus on "Pedagogy first" in the interplay with Space and Technology (PST) and the inclusion of Participatory Design (PD) when re-conceiving multi-campus and flexible hybrid learning spaces in Higher Education. Future university campuses are physical as well as virtual, a living laboratory where both students and teachers can explore pedagogical, methodological and technological solutions together in learning environments that focus on student active learning, problem-based learning and team-based learning, and where knowledge is not transferred, rather co-produced.