FLEXspace Update: What's in Store for AY '23-'24?

• 09/11/23

Our stats are holding strong with more than 6,000 members from about 1,400 institutions across 70-plus countries. The largest growth we're seeing is in the K12 demographic — a great way for those of us in higher education to see what the next wave of students will have already been exposed to!

Our stats are holding strong with more than 6,000 members from about 1,400 institutions across 70-plus countries.

Grush: Your leadership of FLEXspace is enriched by your roles at your home institutions. Could you remind us of your titles at your institutions and describe how you are able not only to "hold down the fort" for both FLEXspace and your home institutions, but actually make it possible for them to support and serve each other so nicely?

Frazee: When I first joined the FLEXspace team, I had been teaching in the learning design and technology graduate program at San Diego State University for many years. This year, after fifteen years wearing my faculty hat, I switched gears and took a staff position at UC San Francisco, working remotely from San Diego, as a digital equity education analyst in the recently formed IT Education Division. I am responsible for overseeing the portfolio of teaching and learning tools we provide centrally, working with my team to ensure equitable access to secure, accessible, high-quality learning tools and experiences to all schools across campus. Though I'm not directly involved in the design of physical learning spaces at UCSF at the moment, with my background in teaching, edtech, and the design of learning experiences and environments, I hope to serve as an influencer and sounding board to support my campus partners who oversee learning spaces at UCSF, and of course bring them into the FLEXspace community.

There are several renovation and building projects on campus, as well as curricular change in some programs and schools. It's an exciting time to be thinking about the future of health sciences and medical education, and how physical and digital learning environments can be designed to support inter-professional education, simulation and immersive learning, field-based experiential learning, and hybrid and hyflex learning — all with an eye on inclusion, individual well-being, and accessibility in addition to learning outcomes. I will continue to talk with my colleagues to see what UCSF learning spaces they'd like to share with the FLEXspace community.

Stephens: I'm the senior strategist for academic innovation in the office of the SUNY provost and assistant dean of the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The University at Buffalo is an amazing campus where our office of online education within SEAS reports to a very forward-looking dean and academic affairs team who care intensely about equity and inclusion on all fronts.

In my SUNY role I'm very fortunate to be part of some large-scale projects that focus on innovation in education — which is how FLEXspace was launched, by the way.

Sharing ideas inside FLEXspace has helped several of our schools — a contribution that in turn gets back to the community.

My role in the FLEXspace community is complementary to my institutional roles. It's the type of collaboration we do well in higher education and a great recipe for moving ahead. As I've said many times in the past: What could be better than working in higher education?

[Editor's note: Image courtesy of KWALL]