Abstract
If the COVID pandemic virtually shutdowned most of the face-to-face activities on the campuses, it also induced an unprecedented paradigm shift on the teaching and learning practices that goes beyond the face-to-face / distance dimension usually concentrating the prospective discussions. Among the practices that experienced a dramatic increase of use through the responses implemented since spring 2020, some of them reflected a significant evolution of the faculties’ mindset regarding novelty in their teaching activities. The asynchronous learning activities, especially, that are natively conducted online, showed relevancy important enough to consider a face-to-face transposition in the post-COVID scenarios, making these more than a simple restoration of the pre-COVID configuration. In such a transposition, the Learning Commons, generalized in Japan, could find an opportunity to move from the informal activities they usually host, to a non-formal model that would imply a closer involvement of the faculties. They could thereby reach a new level of integration in the academic strategies, and overcome the pre-COVID limitations they were facing regarding the Active Learning practices they were designed to support. As a foreshadowing of middle and long-term perspectives for the teaching and learning practices, this paper comes back on the pre-COVID situation of these Learning Commons, and discusses the nature and the conditions of the transposition of new asynchronous face-to-face activities that could involve them.
