FLEXspace – the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange, an open repository of learning space exemplars – free to higher education - was official launched for production at the 2015 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting. Now three-plus years into maturity, this presentation introduces the new, custom 2.0 mobile portal filled with updated research opportunities and tools/resources that save time, money and effort planning and assessing learning spaces.

In addition to SUNY, a consortium of higher education systems provides leadership and financial support: the California State University, California Community Colleges systems, and most recently - Penn State!

FLEXspace has realized international recognition for its utility in sharing best practices and guiding constructive, integrated planning across campus stakeholder groups (faculty, students, facilities planners, AV/IT integrators and academic support professionals). A growing body of evidence suggests that when coupled with the Learning Space Rating System (LSRS), significant amount of energy can be saved following an assessment pathway that invites these stakeholders to work together in a more productive, streamlined fashion which will be summarized for this presentation.

New features to be introduced include Galleries to organize spaces thematically, Toolkits that feature “how to’s” for faculty and academic technologists, Idea Boards (think of Pinterest™ for learning spaces), Institution Pages (enabling a campus to leverage the portal to collect and describe a campus collection), and Partner pages that highlight new sponsored solutions. All of these updates enable idea collaboration within a campus, or to reach across and engage experts and faculty outside of the institution with a story to tell.

60 countries are now registered to use FLEXspace! What started as a simple request from the SUNY Provost to a Learning Environments Task Group has morphed into a SUNY-branded, open, global resource supported and sustained by visionary companies that want to better understand how to support the products and services used by higher education, K-12 and other types of learning environments. A recent partnership with ISTE and the Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) has enabled exciting new discussions on space planning in K-12 environments! This goes a long way in bolstering the Chancellor’s vision for understanding the K-12 pipeline and building environments to prepare students for future workforce, research and education needs!