I had the good fortune to tune it to the EDUCAUSE ELI Web Seminar “Assessment of Learning Spaces” this afternoon. The archive is online for ELI members. Particularly interesting to me is that the University of Dayton has not only done assessment of learning spaces but has used the results to make changes in how their spaces are configured. Not all of the findings are particularly surprising (particularly those that relate to libraries) but it is good to have our own conventional wisdom affirmed by research. Even better though to hear an institution taking the information it has gathered, making determinations about the gap between the findings and its goals, and then taking action. Actually closing the assessment loop by putting data into decisionmaking is not an easy thing to do – even in one’s own classroom, much less at an institutional level. In the back of my mind this afternoon is all the data I’ve been involved in gathering over the past years and the question of whether it has really been put into action as it should be.
