Skip to main content
Education Development Toolkit

Principle 4: Effective Learning Environments

What is an effective learning environment?

Tree

The term ‘learning environment’ is a broad one, and refers to spaces, places, attitudes and relationships that students encounter as they learn. As teaching practitioners, we have the power to design, foster and weave together learning environments to ensure that students have an effective and engaging learning experience.

Sustainability Tip

Nurturing and facilitating an effective learning environment is a key element to Education for Sustainable Development. Learning environments are constantly changing along with the diversity of learners. It is important to recognise that the relationship between a learner and the learning environment is personal for each learner. To ensure an effective learning environment, it must be continuously (re)considered in relation to the developing needs of its learners.

This can be supported through facilitating metacognitive tasks that encourage each learner to reflect on the development of their own learning experience. This supports life-long learning and develops learners that are able to engage with and embed the sustainability principles for a fairer, more socially-just future.

The Blended Learning Framework outlines in practical terms how you can optimise physical and digital learning spaces, and how you can foster communication with and between students. It will help you design a balance of synchronous activities (students learning together at fixed times) and asynchronous activities (students learning at their own pace). Manninen et al. (2007) define learning environments under five categories, outlined below.

Before exploring them in more detail, bear in mind that students undergo many transitions into, through and out of their study with us. Whilst each student is unique, there are processes that are common to all students. This Student Lifecycle map follows the journey of our undergraduate students, including common ‘pain points.’ Planning proactively to guide students at these pain points and fostering helpful dialogue ensures that learning environments remain effective. Student Mentors can also have a key role in this.

Inclusivity Tip

The use of blended learning has the power to transform your programme into a fully accessible, inclusive and engaging experience for all our diverse learners. Enabling all students to learn by offering multiple ways of accessing information and meeting learning objectives, along with ensuring clarity and consistency in design and language are part of wider Universal Design for Learning principles that benefit all students including those from typically marginalised groups. If a resource is inaccessible to someone with learning differences or disabilities, they cannot engage. When designing resources it is worth referring to guidance on digital accessibility

More on Effective Learning Environments?

You could explore our Flipped Learning toolkit page.

Mini Deeper Dive into Learning Environments

Having a clear approach to how you will teach students is a crucial step towards designing effective learning environments. Whatever approaches you take, ensuring your students are active participants in their learning is key. These 6 top tips might help you to get started.

It is especially important that synchronous activities are designed to enable students to establish learning communities. Carefully crafted activities will allow students to construct knowledge together, establish supportive groups, develop their abilities, and fuel the motivation that will drive their learning forward outside formal classroom settings (Slavin, 1996).

Inclusivity tip

Be aware that neuro-diverse learners, those with social or emotional challenges, or those with mental health issues may be less comfortable in social learning spaces, and enable or design equivalent synchronous or asynchronous activities for individual or asynchronous completion.

Sustainability Tip

Collaboration is a key element to understanding and overcoming ’wicked’ problems of the 21st century. Considering the interconnectedness of the sustainability principles highlights a key need to work together for a more sustainable future.

It is best to think about physical and digital elements of your course as ‘blended’; effective learning environments see the digital and physical designed together. For instance, the lecture theatre is not a purely physical space when the lecturer uses digital tools to present and engage; students use digital tools to respond, work and communicate, and artefacts of the lecture are studied online afterwards. What matters regarding this blend is how we communicate with students about their learning, how we establish what is expected of them, and how we capture learning that occurs outside formal spaces. One of the ways staff should do this is with module maps, a popular approach with students.

However, it is worth bearing in mind the physical learning spaces you and your students share. While simply changing a physical space may not be possible, it is anyway unlikely to directly impact on student learning: it is the change in approach to learning and teaching that will improve student outcomes (Ellis, 2019). For instance, designing active learning opportunities that take advantage of a more socially orientated space.

Inclusivity Tip

Work with timetabling to ensure your physical spaces are as accessible as possible: this means considering a range of needs, such as wheelchair accessibility, presence of a loop for hearing aid users, good adjustable lighting and colour contrast for those with visual impairments, and adjustable volume and lights for those with hypersensitivity. Enable confidential feedback from students about the physical space, act on it, and negotiate any contradictory needs.

As noted above, the technologies used should be chosen alongside the pedagogical approaches for the programme. For instance, a flipped approach might require technologies to support student learning in the Digital Learning Environment and then digital engagement tools for deeper learning together in the classroom.  shows how to design your DLE spaces as a place where students are directed to return for meaningful communication and activity outside of lectures.

Evaluate the affordances and constraints of different tools and platforms when deciding which to include in your approach. It is worth doing this as a programme team to ensure that students are not overwhelmed with the number and variety of technologies and processes across your programme, module or session: ‘keep it simple’ is a good guiding approach.

Inclusivity Tip

Ensure you consider digital poverty when establishing your programme: how will students without home access to Wi-Fi, or laptops, cope with the demands of your programme? Also consider the digital accessibility regulations in your design: are your learning central pages, resources and tools accessible?

Take time to consider how purposeful trips and placements could be arranged and how the learning could be maximised and / or assessed. Consider how purposeful trips might support learning differently – for example, how and why might it different being in a lecture hall/ seminar room compared to being in a hospital, field, theatre etc? What experience does this afford for the learner?

Inclusivity Tip

Ensure you are up-to-date with the students’ needs and any potential disabilities or issues such as mental health, which might impact on completion of fieldwork, trips and placements. Check the accessibility of external venues, design an equivalent virtual experience where possible, or where essential to the course, identify elements which might be considered ‘reasonable adjustments’ to expectations under the Equality Act 2010.


Sustainability Tip

Highlighting that learning can happen outside of the university creates stronger links for life-long learning and supports the link between real-life practice and experience in a discipline. The learning environment off-campus can be highly effective for embedding disciplinary content and enriching engagement that is otherwise limited to a particular setting.