To better address the needs of entering students, many colleges and universities now include learning community experiences. Typically, learning communities are organized around one of four common models:

1. linked or clustered courses (a cohort of students taking the same group of courses),
2. cohorts in large courses (a group of students in a large course sharing other curricular experiences associated with the large course),
3. team-taught or coordinated studies programs (students taking courses, often with theme-based content, that are team taught by professors from different fields), and
4. living-learning communities (students living together in a residence hall and taking courses together).

Since the early ’90s, Temple University in Philadelphia has had a well-established linked-course learning communities program. About 10 years in, the program was assessed to “establish whether the overall learning community experience [in terms of the activities in the courses] was the same for everyone.” (p. 262) The school discovered that it was not. The differences were a result, first, of the students themselves.

Researchers identified six different clusters of students. In the largest one, “Students were actively engaged in almost all aspects of the learning community experience—from in-class to out of class, on both academic and social fronts.” (p. 256) The second largest cluster consisted of students almost the “antithesis” of those in the first—“not engaged with each other or the teacher and not experiencing high levels of activity either in or outside of class.” (p. 256-257). This caused the researchers to conclude, “Learning communities are not uniformly beneficial for all students.” (p. 262)

They also discovered that not all teachers were including activities usually associated with learning communities—things like having students work in groups. The researchers note that various interactive methods fit naturally with the goals of learning communities. “When an institution makes a commitment to the learning community program, it should recognize also the need to prepare appropriately its faculty to utilize teaching methods that are conducive to positive results.” (p. 264)

A variety of other findings support the general conclusion that the learning community experience is not uniform in its effects. “Students enter learning communities with different goals, different reasons, different attitudes about what helps them learn, and different skills. The learning community experience will clearly enhance and improve the educational experience of some, but can be lost on, even counter-productive, for others.” (p. 263)

This is a robust empirical inquiry of a well-established and carefully designed and executed program. It should cause faculty members involved with learning communities, as well as institutions that have them, not to make assumptions about automatic benefits. It’s a study that shows what should have been suspected from the beginning. Learning communities are a powerful pedagogy, but they are not a cure-all for long-standing problems associated with students who are not well prepared for college or do not accurately expect what it will take to succeed in college.

Reference: Jones, P. R., Laufgraben, J. L., and Morris, N. (2006). Developing an empirically based typology of attitudes of entering students toward participation in learning communities. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31 (3), 249-265.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, March 2009.

Does your program have all the key elements for sustainability?
Site visits to nearly 100 campuses participating in the National Learning Community Project from 1998 to 2004 indicated a recurring pattern of key elements in sustaining successful learning community programs. These elements are:

1. Clear and well-understood mission, vision, and goals
2. Committed leadership, wide connections, and solid volunteer workforce
3. Purposeful and well-implemented curriculum, pedagogy, and structure
4. Appropriate and ubiquitous assessment
5. Ongoing, well-subscribed formal and informal instructional development for both faculty and staff
6. Staff and faculty rewards and incentives commensurate with the valuable contribution learning communities make to student learning and success, faculty and staff development, and institutional transformation
7. Continual cross-divisional attention to implementation issues, e.g., recruitment, marketing, advising, registration, student assignment into residential learning communities
8. Sustained and adequate mixture of resources to enable the above

Can the impact of the program be enhanced simply by fine-tuning what you’re already doing? Where are the key leverage points? Who are the crucial players?

For example, a good faculty learning community is an essential element of a strong student learning community program. So when I’m asked to assess a program, I always ask, “What support is there for faculty to learn about learning community theory and practice? What is faculty understanding about this? Are there common understandings among faculty about learning community goals and core practices?”

Maintenance of consistent quality in a program requires a comprehensive, ongoing faculty development effort, so I would certainly want to know what you are doing to acculturate new faculty to learning community theory and practice and what issues they face. This is especially important now, with large-scale programs and high faculty turnover.

What challenges are emerging at your current stage of development?
Learning-community programs go through some predictable stages of development. At first, the emphasis is usually on technical issues about startup: recruiting and registering students, getting the support of key players for the new innovation, designing the curriculum. Later on, questions turn to more complex issues about program setting, design, and impact.

Most of the lone established learning communities now face the classic challenges of second-stage reform efforts. Faculty retirement and succession are key challenges since many of the early leaders are now retiring.

Size is an important consideration. Too many innovations never become scalable in terms of reaching a large number of students. While some learning-community programs reach a substantial proportion of all first-year students, many successful efforts remain very small and never reach their potential for addressing institutional needs. There are many reasons why this might be the case, but the consequence is an obvious ceiling on their aspirations. And this leads us ask to the question of institutional goals.

Other issues include developing cost-effective approaches in a time of limited services and offering programs that genuinely promote deep learning.

The bottom line here is this: You should expect new challenges to emerge as your program develops. This is normal. And it’s important to be open to new ways to address these challenges.

Does your assessment program lead to improvements?
Perhaps it is an understatement to say that assessment is critical. You have to know where you are to figure out what to do next. Taking a hard look at student learning outcomes is an important first step. Few institutions use assessment as well as they could, and there are now many good tools available. Really, any number of assessment tools – home grown and/or off the shelf – can be used to raise questions about the impact of your learning community.

An increasing number of campuses are embracing focused assessment and data-driven planning to situate, design, and evaluate their learning communities.

Resources
A new monograph appearing in early October 2007, co-published by NASPA and the Washington Center, is titled Learning Communities and Student Affairs: Partnering for Powerful Learning.
Barbara Leigh Smith, Kimberly Eby, Robin Jeffers, Judy Kjellman, Godon Koestler, Toska Olson, Rita Smilkstein, and Karen Spear, “Emerging Trends in Learning Community Development.” The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education’s News, winter 2006.

Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick. Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education. Jossey Bass, 2004.

Barbara Leigh Smith is a senior scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, an emeritus member of the faculty, and a former provost and vice president for academic affairs at The Evergreen State College. Smith and Jean MacGregor are founders of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, which has led learning community development for 20 years.

Excerpted from How to Take a Fresh Look at Your Learning Community, Student Affairs Leader, December 15, 2007.

If you would like to take a fresh look at your learning communities but aren’t sure where to begin, I recommend considering the following questions.

What are your goals?
Let’s start with the obvious: Learning communities are a means, not an end. Our goal is not to have great learning communities. Rather, learning communities provide an affordable and comprehensive means to address a variety of critical issues, such as:

• Improving student retention
• Promoting student success and student engagement
• Fostering curricular coherence
• Supporting developmental education efforts
• Building community
• Promoting student learning

The point here is that your starting question should not be, “How can we improve our learning communities?” Instead, you might ask, “If our goal is to increase the engagement of our students, how can our learning communities help us reach that goal?”

Are all of your core practices strong?
In our most recent book, Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education (Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, and Gabelnick, 2004), we talked about the five core practices in learning communities. It’s useful to ask whether those core practices are strongly present in your learning communities and how they are being implemented.

The core practices are:

• Adopting pedagogical strategies of student engagement and active learning (e.g., collaborative and cooperative learning, use of discussion groups and seminars, inquiry-based fieldwork)
• Fostering deeper learning and critical thinking by helping students integrate knowledge and perceive relationships and connections (e.g., through interdisciplinary curriculum; thematic curriculum; integrative projects, activities, and assignments.
• Purposefully building a sense of community among students, along with the skills for working with others (e.g., through strategies such as living-learning communities, academic projects that involve teamwork, study groups, social events, service-learning, etc.)
• Providing occasions for reflection and assessment (e.g., use of classroom assessment techniques, student self-evaluation, reflective journals, autobiography)
• Respecting and cultivating diversity in the learning community (e.g., using pedagogical strategies of inclusion that support diverse ways of learning, creating supportive learning environments, representing diversity in the curriculum content, situating learning communities to serve students with diverse backgrounds)

Learning communities vary considerably in the ways they develop these core practices. Nevertheless, in designing learning communities, it is useful to ask where each of these core practices is located and who is responsible for promoting them.

Editor’s Note: Part II of this article will appear on Thursday, Nov. 5. Read it now.

Resources
A new monograph appearing in early October 2007, co-published by NASPA and the Washington Center, is titled Learning Communities and Student Affairs: Partnering for Powerful Learning.

Barbara Leigh Smith, Kimberly Eby, Robin Jeffers, Judy Kjellman, Godon Koestler, Toska Olson, Rita Smilkstein, and Karen Spear, “Emerging Trends in Learning Community Development.” The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education’s News, winter 2006.

Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick. Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education. Jossey Bass, 2004.

Barbara Leigh Smith is a senior scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, an emeritus member of the faculty, and a former provost and vice president for academic affairs at The Evergreen State College. Smith and Jean MacGregor are founders of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, which has led learning community development for 20 years.

Excerpted from How to Take a Fresh Look at Your Learning Community, Student Affairs Leader, December 15, 2007.

Indeed, department chairs often cite “conflict” as a top reason for stepping down from the position. Even one toxic, uncivil, non-collegial person can destroy a once-great department, says Robert Cipriano, professor and chair of the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. Cipriano has conducted research and written extensively on the topic of collegiality and found that collegiality ranks fourth, behind teaching, scholarship and service, as the most critical factors affecting personnel decisions and tenure.

Collegiality as a University-wide Policy

In an Oct. 2008 online seminar titled Faculty Collegiality: A Tourniquet for a Hemorrhaging Department, Cipriano talked about the fact that, despite its significance, very few higher education institutions specify collegiality as a criterion for personnel matters. This is a mistake.

In order for universities to foster a collegial environment they need to formally develop and adopt university-wide policies that promote civility, Cipriano says. He also urges institutions to offer workshops to all faculty members on the topic, encourage faculty to hold each other accountable for professional standards of behavior, and establish collegiality a criteria for tenure.

In addition to the university-wide mission statement, Cipriano recommends that each department chair develops a mission statement for the department that includes guidelines for collegiality. This statement builds consensus about future direction and priorities of the department and offers blueprint for decision-making. Finally, for a department to operate in a civil, respectful manner, the chair must set the tone and provide proactive leadership in collegiality.

Signs of Incivility in Academic Departments

If this seems to be placing too much emphasis on something as simple as “playing nice,” consider the following. According to Cipriano, misunderstood, disrespected, and disenfranchised faculty and administrators leave universities, most often citing conflict and miscommunication. Lack of civility also leads to disengagement. Productive faculty who experience a negative, often traumatic incident in their department or college simply disengage from collegial discussions, campus and department service, department socials, and faculty mentoring.

14 Warning Signs of Incivility:

1. Low morale
2. High turnover
3. Increased early retirement
4. Increased absenteeism & tardiness
5. Diminished work quality of once-productive people
6. New faculty struggling to survive
7. Increased illness & health issues
8. Working from home more than usual
9. Lower or poorer work quality
10. Increasing faculty isolation and alienation
11. Low degree of meaningful faculty participation in governance activities
12. Poor faculty performance patterns
13. Low research productivity & poor teaching evaluations
14. Consistency of poorer faculty evaluations

“We in student affairs, specifically in housing and residence life, always want to get faculty involved, but I think it’s really important for us to consider how we can best do that without being an additional draw on time and effort,” says Michelle Rodems, residence coordinator at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

One major partnership between academic and student affairs at UNCW is the Cornerstone Learning Communities Program, a program in which first-year students take eight of their 15 credit hours as part of a learning community that features linked courses and integrative seminars taught in a specially designed residence hall.

New residence hall, new program

The idea for the program began in 2001 among several department chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences as a way to increase interdisciplinary study and reenergize the humanities. A learning communities steering committee comprised of department chairs and representatives from the College of Arts and Sciences Office and the Division of Student Affairs attended the National Learning Communities Summer Institute in 2002 and developed a plan to launch a learning communities pilot in fall 2003.

Cornerstone Hall, a new residence hall, was scheduled to open at the same time, and the steering committee was able to work with the architect to modify the design of the building to better suit the program’s needs.

The learning community model the steering committee came up with consists of eight learning communities of 25 students each. The program is offered to first-year students on a first-come, first-served basis. Students who sign up for the program select a learning community based on their interests. Each learning community consists of a pair of linked basic studies courses and an integrative seminar. Past learning communities included “In Search of Myself: Stories of Culture,” which linked an anthropology course with an English course, and “Talking Heads: Politics and Public Speaking,” which linked a political science course with a communication studies course.

The linked courses are scheduled so that students take them in the same room, one after the other. The integrative seminar combines content from the freshman seminar with themes from the two linked courses. Faculty members from the respective departments teach the basic studies courses, and a student affairs staff member, academic adviser, or librarian teaches the integrative seminars.

Recruiting faculty

One of the challenges early on was convincing faculty to participate. “Some faculty members had a perception that some of those people maybe didn’t have a rigorous enough academic background, and they questioned the rigor of what would be offered in those integrative seminars,” says Claudia Stack, codirector of Cornerstone Learning Communities. “I spoke to that and told them, for example, I have an undergraduate background that is very strong in the classics-I translated Plato as an undergraduate-and that I would like to teach an integrative seminar that included some western philosophy. I was able to give them a concrete example of something rigorous that they understood.”

One thing that got faculty members’ attention was the $3,000 stipend offered by the provost for each faculty member who participates. The program calls for proposals in the fall, a year before the learning communities are to begin. In some cases, faculty have a clear idea of which courses they want to teach and with whom. In other cases, the steering committee matches faculty and integrative seminar instructors.

Linking courses

By January, the learning community faculty teams commit to the program, which also includes mandatory participation in a learning community workshop in May. The workshop includes best practices presentations and time for teams to work together on modifying their courses. “These are courses that exist in the basic studies curriculum. They do get modified somewhat, but not a huge amount because I think faculty feel obligated to cover most or all of the material that’s laid out for the course,” Stack says.

The workshop also serves as an opportunity for faculty to get to know the integrative seminar instructors. This is an important relationship because the integrative seminar instructors work closely with students outside of class and can help faculty better understand the issues these students face.

Sean Ahlum, marketing and computing consultant in the Office of Housing and Residence Life, is an integrative seminar instructor who has enough flexibility in his schedule to attend the same classes that the students in his learning community attend. Ahlum meets with students once a week outside of the basic studies classes. The seminar covers things such as library skills, health and wellness, and technology skills while integrating the themes that come up in the two linked courses. Since Ahlum attends those classes, he is in an excellent position to help students understand the thematic connections between the courses.

In addition, Ahlum meets regularly with the faculty in his learning community and shares his insights about the students’ experiences inside and outside the classroom. “There’s so much programming and so much education going on outside of the classroom. It’s really nice for the professors to be able to get a sense of that through their integrative seminar instructor. They ask me about housing, disciplinary conduct hearings, what academic resources are available to the students outside of class, and what it’s like to eat in the dining hall. I make sure to take them over to eat with our students every now and then,” Ahlum says.

There is another layer of student affairs involvement. Each learning community has a peer mentor, an undergraduate student who works with the learning community faculty and attends the integrative seminar. These peer mentors keep regular journals and contact reports of their interactions with students and meet regularly with the learning community faculty.

Rodems says that students are more likely to express their concerns to peer mentors than to the faculty members.

Outcomes

Although there is not yet much assessment data to analyze the effectiveness of the Cornerstone Learning Communities, those involved point to several positive outcomes thus far.

“After being in a learning community for a while, students start to look for other connections in their other classes, which I think is pretty neat,” Stack says.

Faculty benefit as well. “I think faculty get a more holistic picture of the student. They see that the student is engaging in activities and relationships around campus and they’re not all class-related, and they realized how important the professionals in other areas are to the students’ development,” Stack says.

Faculty also learn from each other by observing each other’s teaching in a setting that is not a performance evaluation, Stack says.

The Cornerstone Learning Communities program has opened lines of communication between academic and student affairs that were haphazard prior to the program and usually based on chance personal connections across campus, Rodems says. “I don’t think academic affairs realized all the resources available to them. If they have concerns about students, they call me. If they want to do a program, they let the peer mentor or me know, and we organize it.”

Contact Michelle Rodems at roemsm@uncw.edu, Sean Ahlum at ahlums@uncw.edu, and Claudia Stack stackc@uncw.edu.

For the past 10 years, De Anza College, a community college in California, has been on the forefront of the learning community movement by providing faculty members with the expertise and support they need to develop and continuously improve learning communities.

The goal is to make learning communities an ongoing feature at De Anza, says Marcos Cicerone, director of staff and organizational development. With strong administrative support and an extensive faculty development program, the college is succeeding in this goal, offering eight to 10 learning communities per quarter.

De Anza’s learning community model

Learning communities at De Anza College range from two to four linked courses that share the same time block. Because it’s a two-year institution, course articulation requires that faculty work within the framework of existing courses rather being able to create new courses especially for a learning community (which institutions like Evergreen State College and Stanford University are able to do). But each course is redesigned around a common theme that spans all the courses in the learning community.

“It can’t be two courses as they exist with just the students put together. That doesn’t work for us. Some places do that, but for us that is not enough. We need to see that there really is a curricular integration and that the teachers are teaching together,” Cicerone says.

At a minimum each learning community instructor needs to spend at least one hour in the other instructors’ course(s). So scheduling is one of the considerations in matching instructors for learning communities. How the instructors structure that time together is up to them. They may divide each class period equally, or, depending on the week’s content, one may do the majority of teaching in a given week. “As long as we see they are working together in the class, how they want to structure that period is up to them. But we do ask that they spend as much time in each other’s class as possible,” Cicerone says.

Matching instructors

LinC (Learning in Communities) Program staff members conduct workshops to introduce faculty members to the idea of learning communities. Some learning community ideas come from faculty who know each other and want to work together. In other cases, Cicerone and his colleagues recruit faculty based on course combinations they think have potential as well as co-enrollment data — courses that students tend to take in the same semester like English composition, psychology 1, history 1, or political science 1.

At the beginning of the process, each faculty member is asked to take a compatibility survey that asks about time commitment, flexibility, course integration, teaching style, student retention and success, homework, testing methods, grading methods, and attendance policy.

Each faculty member takes the survey individually and discusses it with his or her partner(s) and the LinC adviser. Cicerone likens this meeting to pre-marital counseling and doesn’t try to force a match between instructors.

“If we don’t think it’s going to be successful, if we don’t think it fits the faculty members, we’re honest with them and say, ‘We don’t think it’s going to work,’” Cicerone says.

Developing a learning community

If the instructors are found to be reasonably compatible, the next step is to jointly fill out a Learning Community Proposal Form, which includes items such as

• proposed courses to be included in the learning community
• the learning community’s theme
• sub-topics of the theme
• a description of the course integration
• a description of coordination of pedagogy
• amount of team teaching anticipated
• team-teaching schedules
• rough outline of content (curriculum)
• examples of materials and texts
• assignment samples
• ideas for activities and projects
• grading criteria and methods.

This form also asks how the team will implement collaborative, multicultural, and experiential learning.

Working out these details might take a single meeting or as many as three or four, Cicerone says.

“I think the part that is most challenging for them and the part we work most with is how to go about bringing them together to see how they can integrate the curriculum, how they can integrate the assignments to make it seamless. Faculty tend to come up with a catchy title, but they don’t really develop a theme that can be sustained throughout an entire course,” Cicerone says.

Faculty guidelines

Once they agree on the details of the learning community, the team members read and sign a faculty guidelines form that describes their responsibilities, which include:

• a minimum of one-hour of team teaching per week
• regularly scheduled weekly meetings during the quarter to asses the learning community and students and make changes when necessary
• participation in assessment training, preferably before the learning community begins
• two small-group instructional feedback sessions each quarter
• a faculty exit interview or questionnaire
• at least two LinC counselor visitations per quarter (for feedback and quality control)
• assistance in marketing efforts, such as providing content for promotional materials and visiting classes to promote the learning community
• a minimum commitment of teaching the learning community three times
• encouragement to attend other LinC training events.

Preparing faculty members to teach in a learning community can take place a year or two before they actually develop and teach the learning community.

Institutionalizing the idea

Cicerone hopes to make learning communities an ongoing feature of the De Anza learning experience. Toward that end, De Anza College offer faculty stipends, requires them to teach in each learning community at least three times, and asks them to promote the learning community on campus.

Student success and positive faculty feedback also help promote the idea of learning communities. In addition to improved student retention and success, student focus groups have helped illustrate the benefits of participating in learning communities. Many focus-group responses indicate that they learn to work in groups, and often form their own study groups in other classes that do not feature a learning community and that they learn to manage their time better and are more focused serious, Cicerone says.

Faculty participants often feel more connected to other disciplines after the experience. “This is a way for faculty to get to know another faculty member and by teaching with that faculty member learn a lot about other disciplines. It’s an enriching, invigorating experience to work that closely with another faculty member on an ongoing basis,” Cicerone says.

Contact Marcos Cicerone at ciceronemarcos@deanza.edu.

The two-year program, which is housed in NSU’s Shepard Broad Law Center, uses a cohort model that features a combination of synchronous, asynchronous, and face-to-face learning, to encourage students to seek each others’ opinions and advice.

The program is intended to help working professionals understand and navigate the regulations governing the health care industry.

Summer Institute

Building the learning community begins with the Summer Institute where students meet as NSU for four-and-a-half days for both community building and instructional purposes. The Summer Institute occurs each year and provides students at different stages in the program to interact.

During the first year, students learn about the American legal system’s structure and history, the basics of the course system, and legal research and reasoning techniques.

In the third year, graduating students present the results of their Individual Research Projects, which helps others in the program refine their project ideas and gives them a clearer sense of the process.

“We start them off so they have some sense of who their classmates are. I really think that’s important in our program to help create a community,” says Kathy Cerminara, associate professor at NSU’s Shepard Broad Law Center and former MHL director.

Online community building

The program has several features that build upon the relationships that are begun on campus.

To provide continuity and the tools to build a community, each course uses WebCT and features modules that include reading materials, links to pertinent materials, hypothetical problems, lecture notes, video clips of lectures, threaded discussions, chat, and quizzes.

Each course offers chat at least twice per semester, but students are not required to participate to allow some flexibility. “Some professors use chat as a real pedagogical tool, asking preplanned questions, presenting hypothetical situations. Others use them as online office hours, asking questions like, How is the course going? What questions do you have? How does what we’re learning fit in with current events?” Cerminara says.

Ensuring that all the courses are structured similarly is important, particularly because the instructors, like the students, are from all over the country. To further ensure continuity, faculty are invited to the Summer Institutes to share online teaching ideas with each other. The program director also evaluates each course.

The program also features community building items that are not course specific. For example, in their final semester, when students are on their Individual Research Projects, the have access to a “course” that has not content but is set up to enable students to communicate with each other about their projects and perhaps share drafts with each other.

The student services staff also sends out periodic e-mail messages that might be of interest to the students such as news of student of faculty achievements.

“Students often start their own chatter as a result of that,” Cerminara says. “Whether it’s the in-person contact, whether it’s the tools we provide, they have taken it upon themselves to exchange their personal e-mails. I know that’s happening. I know they’re setting up chats outside of courses. I know they’re creating this class identity that goes above and beyond them being students in these individual classes.”

The program graduated its first cohort in 2003, and while there have been no formal studies about the effects of the community-building efforts, Cerminara points out that the student drop rate is low — in a cohort of 35 students, 32 or 33 will graduate. “Is it due to the kind of students we draw? Are we running some amazingly unusual courses? I’d like to think that part of it is that they have this network of people, and they really do support each other,” Cerminara says.

For more information about the program, visit www.mhl.nsulaw.nova.edu. Contact Kathy Cerminara at cerminarak@nsu.law.nova.edu.

• improve students’ abilities to use the internet as a research medium
• provide students with networking opportunities and build learning communities beyond the classroom
• improve students’ writing skills.

Miami University-Middletown is a commuter campus, so opportunities for students to interact with each other outside of class are limited. Blogs helps students know each other at a “deeper” level, Baim says.

She uses LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) in her courses and requires each student to set up an account and create a personalized web page by choosing an individual user name, page colors and borders, font size and type, animated mood icons, and photographs.

Baim encourages students to include personal information on their web pages, which can include an e-mail address, location, college or university, birth date, and interests. Since the forum is public, she reminds students not to post anything they wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with the world. For the duration of each course, Baim requires students to list each other in their friends group, which allows for easy access to each others’ pages.

To encourage students to use their blogs, Baim creates a blog of her own and asks students to post their thoughts on their blogs and respond to each other frequently. She also asks students to introduce new topics, questions, and controversial points of view to keep discussions lively.

Baim requires her students to write at least 500 words per week on their blogs and respond to at least five classmates or other students within the business technology program. The nature of the exchanges is open-ended. Because many of her students are non-traditional with full-time jobs, families, and perhaps more stress than traditional students experience. “Blogs are a way to talk about some of these issues, and many students say they enjoy being able to talk to people outside their immediate families.”

Like a threaded discussion in a course management system, blogs can maintain an accurate, semi-permanent record of a dialogue. Unlike a threaded discussion, blogs provide students with a public forum in which they can connect with people with similar interests from around the world and express their opinions and interesting information they find on their own web page. LiveJournal has thousands of communities, and Baim’s students can interact with people from other campuses.

“For students who are learning about technology, having them create their own personalized web pages is an interesting way to go,” Baim says. “What’s really interesting about it is that the people on LiveJournal talk about just about anything in the world, things that are not in newspapers. Some of our students taking language courses, for example, can go to people who live in Spain or other Spanish-speaking countries and read what they post.”

Learning Outcomes

Baim has used LiveJournal in her courses for the past four years and has found that students

• develop a better grounding in fundamental course concepts and use their online discussions to refine ideas that were introduced in the classroom
• seek peer assistance with difficult course concepts, homework, or projects
• become more active in their discussions after guest speakers participate in classroom discussions
• establish networks among themselves by adding each other to specialized friends groups
• come to class better prepared for face-to-face discussion, asking more thought-provoking questions. Baim speculates that this is due to the relationships students develop online and the additional time they have to formulate ideas.

When students gain experience using blogs in her courses, sometimes they continue even after the course has ended, Baim says.

Contact Susan Baim at baimsa@muohio.edu.

“What I was reading about midcareer faculty in the literature did not match what I was seeing, which was [midcareer] faculty members who were very excited, very enthused, and very energized by being involved,” she says. “I thought it was too simplified to say all midcareer faculty have this plateau. It’s not representative of how complex a role faculty have.”

What she found through her research is that midcareer faculty tend to have professional interests and needs that learning communities can fulfill. (A learning community as defined by Evergreen State College, one of the leading institutions in the learning community movement, is “a purposeful restructuring of curriculum to link together courses or coursework so that students find greater coherence in what they are learning and greater interaction with faculty and peers.) “Indeed, learning community experts Barbara Leigh Smith and Jean McGregor say that midcareer faculty are at the perfect stage in their careers to get involved with learning communities,” Ellertson says.

While new faculty are often engaged in research that will help them earn tenure, and while senior faculty are often interested in mentoring new faculty and leaving legacies, midcareer faculty are often interested in

• finding new creative outlets,
• networking and collaborating,
• developing solutions to institutional problems,
• engaging in interdisciplinary work, and
• engaging more deeply in teaching and mentoring students.

One of the things Ellertson found in her research was that faculty who participated in learning communities were already engaged in teaching-intensive activities at the institutions. As a result, when recruiting faculty, the institution should not only ask, “What could we have them do that’s appealing to them?” but also ask, “Where do we find them?”

“I think we find them through our teaching and learning centers on our campuses,” Ellertson says. If a campus has no formal center, there’s still an epicenter of people who focus on teaching and learning through conferences and informal groups. Institutions can also invite faculty who have won teaching awards. “It seems a little bit obvious, but we aren’t always doing those things,” Ellertson says. “Those are opportunities to tap into the folks who are really interested in undergraduate education. It happens because of relationships.”

Because of the traditional relationships between faculty and students, interaction outside of class can be difficult for some faculty and students, Ellertson says. “Simply having a pizza party and expecting magical interaction to occur between faculty and students is somewhat unrealistic, because most [students and faculty] are unaccustomed to interacting with each other in that informal sense. Yet faculty in my study said that that was one of the unique things about learning communities-that there are these opportunities [for interacting with students] that just don’t occur otherwise.”

Student affairs staff sometimes believe that student development is their exclusive domain, Ellertson says. However, faculty have some student development experience, and their interest in deepening that experience can be a motivator for participating in learning communities. “Faculty know this stuff from their experiences. They might not be able to name the theory, but they know the cycles of their students, and they’ve seen it,” Ellertson says.

The motivation for most faculty members who participate in learning communities is intrinsic, Ellertson says.

Learning community work often isn’t recognized at the institutional or departmental levels, Ellertson says. It isn’t built into many institutions’ faculty reward structures. In addition, the faculty she interviewed cited departmental indifference-or even departmental resistance-as a drawback of participating.

“Some [respondents] said that their departments were oblivious to the fact that they were doing it,” she says.

On the other hand, faculty cited the pride and satisfaction they get from helping students as the main motivator for participating in learning communities. Faculty also said they liked helping build students’ citizenship by engaging them in civic-minded, service-learning projects.