Educators can’t truly deliver 21st-century instruction in schools that reflect Industrial-Age designs, with rigid schedules, inflexible facilities, and fixed boundaries between grades, disciplines, and classrooms, according to a new white paper from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21).

Sponsored by Cisco Systems, the paper–titled “21st Century Learning Environments”–describes the kinds of school structures that have been shown to facilitate successful 21st-century teaching and learning: from flexible learning spaces that can be rearranged to fit different class sizes and subjects, to more malleable units of time than the typical 50-minute class period.

Although much attention has been paid to improving standards, assessments, professional development, curriculum, and instruction, this white paper argues that learning environments themselves are an essential component to supporting successful 21st-century outcomes for students.

“Schools are being designed for a new balance that combines the best of traditional classroom learning with leading 21st-century learning methods and tools,” said Bernie Trilling, global director of education strategy and partnerships for the Oracle Education Foundation. “At the same time, federal, state, and local policies must help guide the creation of learning environments that serve all students in every corner of our states.”

Globalization is a hot buzzword in the media right now, and for good reason. Many corporations are have operations worldwide. A large company might have offices on multiple continents. And some large companies are making unprecedented alliances with competitors. While face-to-face interactions still play an important role in conducting business, it’s just not possible to limit all collaborative projects to personal meetings.

That’s why many companies are looking into online collaboration. Online collaboration uses the Internet as a common meeting and work space. Instead of sitting in a physical conference room, employees access virtual work environments. That work space might be a shared database in which employees can store and access data in a collaborative way, or it might be as complex as a full-fledged virtual environment. They save their work in a shared database, and everyone works from the same files and data.