CILC is a consortium committed to supporting regional academic institutions that offer interdisciplinary learning communities, related learner-centered pedagogies, and the faculty development that supports them.

Communication

Communication between Illinois educational institutions is crucial to the development of the learning communities movement. Just as we strive to build communities with our students, we must also work on building communities with faculty, administrators and our institutions. Together, we can make a more significant impact on the success of our students. There is no need for each institution to "re-invent" the wheel when other institutions are readily available with expertise in all areas of program development. Sharing information, experiences, and failures become extremely important when developing innovative programs.

The CILC is currently revising this website to help facilitate communication; we have recently launched a "Member to Member" page where institutions can post areas of success and challenge so that members from other institutions might share resources and insights. We will also be developing a discussion board in the near future, as well as a Links page to help keep members informed of national and regional learning community conferences and events.

Future Goals

Currently, the CILC hosts a Best Practices Symposium at the end of April of each year to encourage members to come together and share what works well and to showcase innovative practices at area institutions. Should there be demand or interest, we would like to host curricular retreats for campus teams interested in developing their understanding of innovative pedagogies and assessment. These retreats would combine formal interactive presentations with substantial time for campus teams to work together, if they wish, with the services of an outside consultant.

In addition, we hope to continue to provide on-campus resource consulting visits by experts. To date, CILC teams have presented at Kishwaukee Community College and Wright College to assist them in starting their learning communities initiatives.

One important future goal of the consortium is to compile learning community assessment data for multiple Illinois Institutions. This data pool will provide adequate numbers of respondents which would be beneficial to those institutions who have a limited number of learning community classes. Having comparable data across campuses, we believe, would be extremely beneficial to everyone. We are currently looking for institutions who would be willing to participate in such a project.

Institutional Membership

Becoming a member at the institutional level allows all faculty and administrators from your college or university to participate in CILC events at a substantially reduced fee, as much as 50% for some activities (such as on-site presentations). Institutional membership will help build a more diverse consortium and encourage more participants from each college, as each member institution is entitled to send representatives to our Executive Committee. For details on how to apply to become a member, please go to the Application page on this site.