Learning Lab Yurt

Our Terrace campus yurt serves as a teaching lab. It is a place for inspiration and innovation to promote and elevate teaching and learning at Coast Mountain College.

Here, our faculty is invited and supported to explore experiential and place-based ways of designing curriculum, delivering instruction and assessing learning.

Once described as “an architectural wonder” by Architectural Digest, the traditional nomadic home of Mongolia and surrounding regions, typically referred to as a Ger, has been widely used for thousands of years. Key factors in defining a yurt are that it is portable, circular, has an accordion lattice wall, a tension band, radial rafters leading up to a central compression ring and is covered in felt or fabric.

See more at: yurts.com/what-is-a-yurt

Why are we using a yurt?

Three reasons:

  1. The physical shape directs its use. A yurt is round, which lends itself easily to active and participatory learning.
  2. It stands out as different which creates intrigue and invites users out of their comfort zones to help facilitate experimentation with teaching and learning.
  3. Our yurt is a visual artifact that signifies our intentions to accomplish our goal to be the college of choice for experiential, place-based learning by 2027.

Building information

  • 452 square feet of space
  • 12.6” center height
  • can accommodate 20+ students

How the yurt is used

The yurt is used as an innovation teaching and learning space for classes. It is also an additional meeting space for the campus, which is comfortable and spacious.

And it’s a place to cultivate community connections as it is rented out to community groups.

Centre of Learning Transformation 

For more information on experiential learning visit CMTN's Centre of Learning Transformation (COLT).