Why does it take a flight to Washington to get Ohio’s community colleges, public universities and private colleges to sit down at the same table for a discussion?

One agenda item from last year returned: how to encourage colleges to work with each other and the private sector to improve job training, a small-group discussion that included two art institutes, community colleges and state universities.

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.

The group is also starting to share some academic programs. Despite stretching a geographic area of more than 300 miles, five colleges in the consortium -- University of Charleston, Bethany College, Davis & Elkins College, Emory & Henry College and West Virginia Wesleyan College -- are launching a shared remedial math program next year.

Small colleges across the country have formed several partnerships to share faculty in certain fields. Languages have proven particularly popular. This week a group of five liberal arts colleges in Texas announced that they would be teaching languages across the institutions using video conferencing software. The Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, many of which are regional in orientation and don’t show up high on the U.S. News rankings, also has some resource sharing programs in place.

UC officials say the arrangement allows the university to replace adjunct faculty members with an expert in American history.

Blended learning, a process of teaching that combined face-to-face classroom teaching with computer-mediated activities, has been on the rise at universities throughout the country.

Ninety-three percent of higher-education instructors and administrators say they are using blended learning strategies somewhere in their institution, according to the 2005 book "Handbook of Blended Learning." Seven in 10 expect more than 40 percent of their schools' courses to be blended by 2013.

collaborating on engineering-design projects and research activities, exchanging students and professors, and pooling their expertise to work more closely with industry.

The new alliance would instead be based on "universities that have similar missions and share key characteristics,

For example, they could focus on energy challenges one year and clean-water problems the next.

Both projects, says Deborah E. Allen, the NSF grant manager who worked with them, aim to "capture authentic research experiences within biology courses" at the undergraduate level

The hope is that a project like Mr. Boyle's can bring some of the same benefits to a larger number of students.

Mr. Boyle's project is a direct descendant of a project that a Davidson College biology professor, A. Malcolm Campbell, has been running for a decade. In Mr. Campbell's project, called the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching,