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tag: CIC

Blog Post
September 15, 2016

Online Courses Meet Specialized Needs of Small, Independent Colleges

The Council of Independent Colleges, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, invited its 700 members to apply to be part of the Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction. Even though the hallmark of CIC member institutions is their personalized learning for their students in small classroom settings, many of them wanted to understand more about online learning as it was receiving so much press coverage at the time. Twenty-one institutions were selected from 100 applications in the spring of…
Research Report
September 15, 2016

CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction

Evaluation Report for Second Course Iteration Treatment

The Council of Independent Colleges, a membership organization of more than 700 institutions, aims to support independent colleges and universities and their leaders as they advance institutional excellence and help the public understand private education’s contributions to society. CIC members, historically, have taken considerable pride in their offerings of highly personalized instruction for their students. As online learning began to be discussed in the mainstream media, CIC members considered the implications of this new form of pedagogy for their institutions.
Case Study
November 4, 2015

Leveraging Technology for the Liberal Arts

The Council of Independent Colleges Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), created in 1956, is a membership organization of nearly 700 independent, non-profit colleges and universities. The organization exists to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society. To achieve these goals, CIC hosts and develops programs, seminars, and conferences that help institutions improve the quality of education, administrative and financial performance, and institutional visibility. Economic pressures have forced presidents of independent colleges to…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015

Can Online Courses Make Humanities Courses More Accessible in Small, Independent Colleges?

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction in 2014. Twenty-one colleges that constituted the consortium agreed to develop online or hybrid courses that could be shared by all participants in the consortium and had three major goals for this project: To provide an opportunity for CIC member institutions to build their capacity for online humanities instruction and share their successes with other liberal arts colleges. To…
Research Report
October 20, 2015

CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction

Evaluation Report for First Course Iteration

Summary of Findings This report provides our preliminary analysis of evidence generated from the planning period and first iteration of CIC Consortium courses. It includes a summary of our findings, followed by a description and presentation of a good portion of the data for those interested in delving deeper. It is important to note that these courses finished very recently, and we (like the faculty members involved) are still processing what we have learned. We have amassed a considerable mass…
Issue Brief
December 17, 2014

Does Online Learning Have a Role in Liberal Arts Colleges?

Liberal arts colleges are known for low professor to student ratios, intimate seminar classes and highly personalized undergraduate experiences. On the surface, it is not obvious how online learning fits with this picture. But these days liberal arts colleges face many of the same pressures as larger universities – resource constraints, the growth of non-traditional students with more extracurricular responsibilities, even uncertainty about how a liberal arts education should evolve to stay relevant in a digital world. There is an…