Our teaching labs, lecture halls, seminar rooms, performance venues, and multi-purpose spaces are some of the most critical sites for teaching and learning across IUB. In these spaces, our faculty inspire students to learn and foster creativity — and challenge them to question and broaden their understandings of the world. As Provost, I want each of these spaces to offer the best possible teaching and learning experience for our students and faculty.
Today, with the student success and research pillars of IUB 2030 strategic planning in mind, I am pleased to announce the launch of “Project Inspire” — a multi-year effort to systematically improve and update instructional spaces on our campus, with a target of dedicating between $2-$5 million per year over the next five years to improve these vital learning spaces.
Since last fall, leaders across the IUB community have engaged in a collaborative effort to evaluate learning space utilization across campus in terms of room capacity, enrollment, meeting frequency, and foot traffic. This spring, the group has expanded its work to include capital planning and facilities and a quality assessment of each learning space. I appreciate the hard work of many individuals in this effort, including Vice President Tom Morrison and Associate Vice President Jim Stewart in Capital Planning and Facilities, Vice Provost for Finance and Administration Aimee Heeter, and Assistant Dean for Administration for the College of Arts and Sciences and Assistant Vice Provost for Finance Mike Fowler.
This exercise has already proven incredibly instructive and will help us prioritize the most beneficial opportunities for upcoming renovations. I often hear the need for updated and reconfigured learning spaces, particularly as buildings age, curricula favor active learning strategies, technologies evolve, and new interactive opportunities emerge.
This new extended funding commitment, which combines and builds on existing renovation efforts, will enable us to bring more timely attention to the places and spaces that will have the most impact on the experience of our students, researchers, and staff. It will also allow us to be more transparent about upcoming renovation priorities, which will be made available through a new initiative webpage to be launched in the coming weeks.
Along with IUB’s new campus space planning committee, which began work last year to review and approve campus-level space needs and transfers, we are making definite strides to ensure we are best allocating and utilizing — and now improving — our learning spaces across the campus to benefit our academic mission.
