A Fresh Look and a New Home: FLEXspace Joins with HETMA and Readies Its Portal Version 3.0
A roundtable with HETMA and FLEXspace leadership
FLEXspace, the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange and HETMA, the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance, have shared that FLEXspace will move under HETMA's management so that both can benefit from well-known synergies between the two nonprofit, community-based organizations. A memo of understanding specifies that FLEXspace will continue to function and grow under its current branding as a free service to the community. FLEXspace will release its powerful 3.0 portal version in early spring.
Here, principal leadership from both groups reflect on the move. Lisa Stephens, executive director, FLEXspace; Joe Way, acting chair, HETMA; and Erin Maher-Moran, Johns Hopkins' multimedia services manager and future chair of HETMA, comment in the following roundtable discussion.
Users can post detailed information about their learning spaces on FLEXspace, including images, like this photo of a visualization studio at North Carolina State University. (Image courtesy NC State University Libraries.)
Mary Grush: How did the idea come about, to move FLEXspace under the leadership of HETMA? Why not just keep it at the State University of New York — at SUNY, where it was fostered from the beginning?
Lisa Stephens: Among the best things about SUNY is the opportunity and support you'll find there for academic innovation. Really great ideas start there and flourish, and FLEXspace was one such great idea. The challenge is that when these innovative projects grow to become large systems and reach new levels of adoption and regular production, it can be very difficult for the originators to continue with their "care and feeding," if you will. We decided it was time to seek a partner to provide the stewardship through which FLEXspace could continue to mature and evolve.
So, we've asked ourselves — for well over a year, actually: Is there another nonprofit organization that would be dedicated to all the principles we've had from the very beginning with FLEXspace? Who would keep it free and open? Who would continue to support our users? We found some real synergies with the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance — HETMA.
Grush: How would you describe those synergies between FLEXspace and HETMA?
Joe Way: HETMA started as an advocacy organization to give our AV technologists an opportunity to have a voice within the greater industry. We were concerned with those who have to make design decisions, with those who work with our manufacturers and integrator partners, with those who work with faculty and staff and ultimately, with our real end users — students.
I've always been a fan of FLEXspace — right from the start, I was "all in" to support it. And as it happened, at HETMA we were also looking for those synergies and principles that Lisa just described. How could we create "the place" for people to turn to? How can we grow while maintaining our foundational values?
I was literally walking down the street from campus one day, when Lisa texted me out of the blue to ask if HETMA would be interested in coming together with FLEXspace. And I thought immediately, "Yes! This is exactly the synergy we need."
Our organization had been founded to serve the people who make AV decisions every day; the boots-on-the-ground instructional designers and their support teams.
When we brought the idea of combining HETMA with FLEXspace to our board, it was an acknowledged no-brainer. The main reason that was true is foundational: We wanted to offer a platform for our users to come together to explore and create showcase spaces that, in the final analysis, benefit our ultimate customers — our faculty and students.