Karen Spear, Edwin Clausen, Paul Burkhardt, and Tim Riordan (2005)
This paper explores the ways in which a partnership model among a group of colleges individually committed to progressive, innovative education has helped to leverage their ability to effect productive change. The paper outlines the creation of CIEL and initiatives pursued in the first five years of the consortium.
One of the benefits of the consortium has been a sharing of approaches to hiring and assisting new faculty in ways that reflect the values and principles fundamental to the participating institutions.
Benefits to students are manifold: moving for a time from a private to a public college or vice verse, experiencing different campus cultures and different political and socio-economic milieus, living in a different geographical region, taking advantage of curricular opportunities and faculty expertise not present on the home campus, developing a rich comparative perspective, and so on. The use of technology has enabled students to enroll in a single course at another institution and for faculty to develop team-taught course sharing across two institutions.