Three Penn State courses have been included in an inaugural program that will encourage 12 universities to share knowledge and instruction through the use of new communications technologies.
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago, has selected three University courses, along with a host of others from other CIC institutions to be part of its Common Market of Courses and Institutes. The program's purpose is to expand access to instructional resources from throughout the CIC.
Through the use of videoconferencing technologies, students from Penn State, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, the Ohio State University, Purdue and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be able to register, pay tuition and receive credit at their home institution, while taking courses from other CIC institutions. The model for this program was piloted in partnership with the University of Minnesota.
The initiative will enable students to acquire seldom-taught foreign languages for use in their research; to take part in seminars with leading researchers in their fields; and to add subspecialties to their majors, using courses from several CIC universities. It will offer faculty members new opportunities to offer courses in their specialties for which there are too few students at their own institutions, and to coordinate offerings with colleagues at other universities.
Courses to be offered this fall range from physics courses on particle accelerators to an art course on women artists of the American West. The three courses contributed by Penn State include: "Case Studies in Turfgrass Management;" "Comparative Literature: African Literatures Written in African Languages;" and " Women Artists of the American West."
For more information on the program, go to the Web at http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/CMCI/cmci_homepage.htm.