CNI Receives Grant for New Learning Communities Program

The Coalition has received a grant from the Department of Education
under the Higher Education Act Title IIB program to fund CNI's New
Learning Communities Initiative. 

The initiative is designed to promote cross- fertilization of ideas
among professionals in higher education institutions across the country
who use networks such as the Internet to enrich their curriculum and
broaden their students' learning experiences.  The program brings
together institutional or inter- institutional teams of faculty,
librarians, information technologists, instructional technologists, and
students, to share perspectives, critique each other's programs, and
develop a set of "best practices" for the benefit of the larger
educational community. 

The goals of the program are:

*	To provide a mechanism and a venue where experienced, collaborative
teams of individuals working on curricular programs involving the use of
networks and networked information can benefit from peer advice, moral
support and program critiques; 

* 	To provide the means for others in the academic community, nationally
and internationally, to benefit from the expertise and experience of
teams who have implemented teaching and learning programs using networks
and networked information; and 

* 	To encourage and assist librarians and information professionals to
serve as partners with teaching faculty members in the design and
delivery of instruction using networking and networked information. 

The Coalition will offer a program consisting of three components that
encompass a total of five days of face-to-face interaction and several
months or longer of online interaction.  The centerpiece of the program
is a three-day conference based on the successful New Learning
Communities conference that the Coalition offered last year.  Following
on this year's three-day conference, two other conferences will be used
to disseminate the lessons learned from the conferences of both years
and to stimulate additional institutions to develop similar curricular
projects.  All three events will emphasize the role of networked
information (content), not just networks (conduit) and the expertise of
the librarian as a team member in developing new or revised curriculum. 

The Coalition will issue a call for team participation in the three-day
conference, which will be invitational.  The second and third events in
the program will be open registration conferences. 

The program was developed by CNI's Working Group on Teaching and
Learning under the leadership of Philip Tompkins, Estrella Mountain
College, and Susan Perry, Mt.  Holyoke College. 


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ARL 181
A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions
Association of Research Libraries
August 1995