Coming Soon to a Storefront by You: A Microcampus for Online Learners

Not every college campus features a full-fledged library, a student union, or residence halls. But when a campus has no classrooms, is it really a campus?

For some, the answer is yes.

As education moves online and colleges seek new ways of interacting with students, alumni, local communities, and other constituencies, institutions as diverse as the University of Phoenix, the University of Washington, and the Georgia Institute of Technology are responding with experimental, storefront-sized “microcampuses.” They’re also looking at unexpected models — such as Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar stores — for ideas to improve students’ experience.

The spaces, some located on the ground floors of apartment buildings or commercial high-rises, give the institutions public visibility while providing stylish drop-in spaces for students. They can also be focal points for colleges’ educational and outreach activities with local employers and community groups.

Microcampuses are typically under 2,500 square feet, with interiors designed for maximum flexibility to accommodate one-on-one tutoring sessions, casual student meetups, employer presentations, and the occasional formal lecture. What they usually don’t have is a set spot designated as a full-time classroom.

The University of Washington’s Othello Commons, which opened in southeast Seattle in January, is a prime example. The 2,300-square-foot space is on the ground floor of a new eight-story apartment building and currently plays host to a “Foundations of Databases” course that meets one night a week to help local residents develop basic IT skills.

Community connections are the prime focus of the Othello Commons. It includes a second-story mezzanine space that offers privacy for future university projects that could be based at the commons, such as College of Education research involving interviews with parents from the neighborhood. As a building tenant, the university can also make use of the comfy couches in the main lobby and the roof deck.

The site, right across from the Othello light-rail stop on a line that connects directly to the main university campus, is an experiment on two levels for UW.

First, it’s a way to test new approaches to working with a neighborhood that is lower-income, more reliant on school-lunch and public-housing assistance, and more dominated by immigrant-owned small businesses than the rest of the city. “Southeast Seattle has always felt a little left out when it comes to higher-education opportunities,” says Sally J. Clark, the university’s director of regional and community relations. The community, she says, was looking for signs of interest from the university. But the university didn’t want to “come in too big and too fast” without first understanding the neighborhood’s needs and wishes.

The course on databases, for example, was created in response to community input. Of the 28 adults enrolled, 13 received scholarship awards that cover 80 percent of course costs. The recipients, many supporting households on incomes of less than $50,000 a year, are all people of color from their mid-20s to their late 40s.

Second, the commons is a way for the university to explore new approaches to its physical footprint as it weighs whether to develop other versions of the commons elsewhere. “We’re trying to figure out how a location, a space, matters,” says Rovy Branon, dean of UW’s Continuum College.

Along with Continuum, which offers the IT class, the university’s Colleges of Education and Built Environments and its Schools of Nursing and of Public Health are all developing programs to be based at the Commons. But “it’s not like we’re going to have English 211 there,” says Clark.

Other microcampuses offer variations on the Othello Commons model. Many of them look to trendy co-working spaces like WeWork — and even more interestingly, the new physical Amazon stores — as models.

For the University of Phoenix, which will roll out its first microcampus this summer in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, the approach marks a shift in direction. The locations it has historically chosen for campuses offering face-to-face classes tend to be in suburban office parks with lots of parking. But as the university’s enrollment increasingly shifts to online courses, it’s paring back those locations and eyeing a new breed of sites that are more accessible by foot and public transit.

Raghu Krishnaiah, the university’s chief operating officer, says each location will be a little different, depending on local needs. But all will be designed as points of university outreach to alumni, employers, local community colleges from which it draws transfer students, and especially current students, who can “pop in” to use a computer, print a document, or chat with an adviser.

Designs are still being drawn up, but Krishnaiah says the university is aiming for the WeWork vibe, though without one of WeWork’s notable free-flowing amenities. “Hot coffee, yes,” he says. “Beer, no.”

Indeed, for some 18,000 online students from more than two dozen universities, WeWork is already more than a microcampus metaphor — it is the microcampus. Since early 2018, students taking courses that are managed by the ed-tech company 2U receive full memberships to WeWork as part of their tuition.

Having that option made a world of difference to Mary Bradley, 34, who is now enrolled in an online version of Yale University’s physician-assistant degree. Last year, before beginning clinical rotations, she and two other Austin, Tex.-area students in the program met regularly at two of the area’s WeWork locations to discuss class assignments and share face-to-face time — filling a need that many microcampuses are designed to meet. It wasn’t essential, Bradley says, “but we liked to. We’re human.”

A coffee shop could have served the same purpose, she says, but they can be noisy, and if you stay for a while, “you feel you have to get more coffee.” And unlike a coffee shop or a library, WeWork sites have options for privacy. That came in handy for Bradley and her classmates when they practiced giving physicals to one another in one of the private rooms. “I don’t know that we could do that at the library,” she says. “Definitely not at the coffee shop.”

The new Amazon stores now popping up around the country are also influencing microcampus designs. Here’s how, according to Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech: The company has “taken the design vocabulary of the Amazon online experience” and built it into the physical spaces. In those stores, shoppers don’t see vast inventories of books or products. Rather, just as when they’re online in the Amazon site, they find themselves being prodded by recommendations to explore other products that might interest them, based on what they’re looking at at the moment.

Georgia Tech is planning a similar approach in a new distributed-campus model called the “Georgia Tech atrium” — its take on the microcampus. The university is developing its first atrium prototype in a mixed-use building called Coda, in midtown Atlanta, not far from the main campus. Designs are still in progress, but the Amazon experience is a big part of the vision, right down to the university’s plans for an app — in the vein of the Amazon shopping app on a smartphone — that could complement people’s use of the space.

“If you come with the app and you register with the atrium, the app starts to learn more about you,” says DeMillo. The app could help pinpoint whether an atrium visitor might want, say, guidance on test-preparation, career counseling, or perhaps just a chance to buy some Georgia Tech swag.

“The combination of the physical space and the cyber version of the app is what we’re banking on.” says DeMillo. “The more the physical presence knows about you, the richer the experience becomes.”

The Amazon store is also an influence for Southern New Hampshire University. Having recently absorbed the nonprofit skills-training organization LRNG, the university is now preparing to roll out microcampuses designed especially to appeal to young people “looking for just the right education, in just the right amount, in just the right time.”

Its first site is likely to be in Birmingham, Ala., by the end of 2019, with additional locations in Chicago and New Orleans in 2020.

As with the other institutions, Southern New Hampshire doesn’t expect to use its microcampuses for teaching-degree programs or the online LRNG courses, which are aimed at helping young people build work skills. Rather, they would be places where an online student might come in the evening to escape noisy siblings in an overcrowded apartment.

Paul LeBlanc, the university’s president, says he doesn’t yet know exactly what the microcampuses will look like. But a couple of years ago he spent two hours in an Amazon store in Palo Alto, Calif., watching how the customers experienced a bricks-and-mortar retail space that had grown from an online one. That showed him that the university needed to be creative when developing new physical spaces “in an increasingly virtual world.”

David J. Staley, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, is the author of the new book Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). He isn’t surprised by the direction microcampuses are taking because it mirrors where retail is going: “It’s about experiencing the brand.”

Georgia Tech’s vision, which also calls for incorporating services powered by artificial intelligence, won’t come cheap. The university expects to finance some of the features in partnership with companies and other organizations. But in general, microcampuses can be a lot less expensive to develop and operate than other university facilities. For the Othello Commons, for example, the University of Washington paid about $300,000 for its tenant improvements to the space, and it expects to spend about the same amount annually to operate the location.

Staley, who also teaches in the departments of design and education studies, says the ultimate value of microcampuses may be hard to measure. If they help colleges forge better connections with current and potential students, he says, that could be important, “because that’s going to be the big challenge for institutions in the next several years.” But as he also notes, their affordability is a distinct plus, too. After all, says Staley, “it’s not like building a campus in Dubai.”