Multi-dimensional evaluation model of quality of life in Campus

Abstract

The quality of teaching and research activities in Universities are somehow related to the quality of the spaces where they take place, either when considering the buildings’ facilities, or when taking into account the campus landscape. Some authors have concluded that the students' perception of their overall academic experience and the campus environment is related to academic accomplishment and success. Furthermore, keeping and increasing the quality of life in public spaces are also recognised as critical aspects concerning the urban sustainable development perspective. In that context, and when analysing characteristics, form, dimension and organisation of university campi, it can be concluded that they can be seen as urban spaces. Also, this fact is often enhanced due to their location: in urban areas or even merged in the city. In this context, based on concepts for urban spaces, a multi-dimensional evaluation model of the quality of life in campus is presented in this paper. Its main purpose is to provide conceptual bases for the implementation of a decision support system that evaluates the global index of the Quality of Life in the Campus (QlC). The process integrates users’ perception and provides the ability to assess the impact of future interventions on the campus quality of life using scenarios. Those scenarios will express the changes in QlC through subsequent indicators values and global index update. The assessment of the QlC variation that would result from the scenario execution will serve as a decision support tool for campus management when studying several possibilities. The case study presented explores and shows the web based information system for monitoring the QlC of the Gualtar Campus of the University of Minho, located in Braga, Portugal. Basically, the model aims at determining a QlC variation and by comparing different moments in time. The system embodies two main functions related to its sustainable development process: (i) to inform the community, allowing any user to know which are the considered indicators and their actual values, and how the QlC has evolved; (ii) to serve as a decision support tool, mainly in facilities planning and management, allowing to compare the impact of several scenarios on several quality of life dimensions, through an evaluation that integrates the users’ perception.