Faculty Learning Communities

Site Map

3. What FLCs to offer for the year

Give consideration to causes that central administrators are willing to support, for example early-career faculty (an important investment in the future), technology, diversity, and the first-year experience (retention). Look in the Examples section for descriptions of Miami FLCs and the types of FLCs initiated at the FIPSE institutions.

Another source for FLCs will be faculty. For example, some faculty may have seen their majors graduate and enter graduate or professional programs that use problem-based learning (PBL). These faculty will lobby for an FLC on the topic of PBL. At Notre Dame, there is no statistics department, so faculty from various departments got together and initiated an FLC on Teaching Statistics.

There are planning documents that you can use to determine the components you wish to select for an FLC that you are designing.

There are documents that Miami faculty must use to propose an FLC. This online procedure streamlines the proposal process and the guidelines generate the proposers FLC description, budget, and FLC member application form. The Center’s staff or advisory committee can select the FLCs with the most potential. This online FLC proposal process perhaps should be engaged only after an FLC program has been established on campus for awhile. Using this approach is helpful in the case of scarce resources and several proposals.

This project has been supported in part by a grants from the US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) and the Ohio Board of Regents.