Here are six academic areas that cry out for potential collaboration across the liberal arts college sector and between the liberal arts colleges and research universities.
1. Liberal arts colleges must aspire to internationalize their curriculum, teach the less commonly taught languages and invigorate or create new programs in geopolitical areas such as Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, South and East Asia.
2. Liberal arts colleges want the flexibility to explore intellectual themes that connect departments and disciplines but do so without creating new majors and without adding new faculty.
3. Liberal arts colleges seek to provide undergraduate research opportunities for students outside the sciences integrating teaching and research across the curriculum presents a complicated set of financial, pedagogical and logistical challenges.
4. Liberal arts colleges want to support faculty members’ integration into the digital humanities into their teaching and scholarship. In order to accomplish this goal, colleges need access to communities of practice and institutional infrastructure that build capacity and that address the challenges of training, standards, critical mass, interoperability and sustainability.
5. Liberal arts colleges also need to use digital technology to create new teaching resources such as virtual labs and to create truly interactive learning platforms for use in introductory courses in subjects such as statistics, mathematics and modern language.
6. Liberal arts colleges need to create arts-based campus cultures that embrace the making of art as an integral component of the life of the mind and a complementary means of connecting different bodies of knowledge.
Lisa Spiro on 07 Dec 12"Yale, Cornell University, and Columbia University, backed by a two-year, $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have launched a pilot program to conduct classes in uncommonly taught languages, including Indonesian, Yoruba, and Zulu, across the different campuses using videoconferencing technology. In doing so, they're reviving not only language programs on the brink of extinction, but also a familiar concept in distance education. At a time when asynchronous instruction reaching hundreds of thousands of students is increasingly common, these universities are returning to a mode of distance learning geared toward small classes in which students all meet at the same time."
Bryan Alexander on 10 Dec 12Interesting to see the emphasis on very high end, very expensive tech.
