BOWLING GREEN, O.—A $45,000 start-up grant from the Ohio Learning Network to Bowling Green State University is supporting the development of an OLN regional center for faculty learning communities.

Bowling Green is one of five universities to which OLN is giving a total of $225,000 to create regional centers. Other centers are being created at Kent State, Miami, Ohio State and Shawnee State universities.

Bonnie Fink, interim director of BGSU's Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology, is the director of the new center and co-principal investigator for the grant with Connie Molnar, director of Interactive Distance Education for All Learners (IDEAL) in Continuing and Extended Education.

“OLN has invested in a number of learning communities around the state, and creating the centers is a way of organizing and formalizing them,” Fink said. “Now the centers will step up and spearhead the many ideas that are springing up from faculty in all areas.”

The learning communities in this case are groups of faculty colleagues who will work collaboratively to increase their knowledge, share ideas, enhance their teaching and evaluate one another's work in specific areas.

The BGSU region, which extends as far east as Lorain County Community College, serves 21 public and private partner learning institutions, including Bluffton University, Heidelberg College and Owens, Rhodes, Terra and Northwest State community colleges.

“It's clear it's going to be a collaborative endeavor and a team effort. We really want to involve as many people as possible from all the centers and all the institutions,” Fink said, adding she is “reaching out in all directions” to populate the center's advisory board.

Learning communities can be totally online, face to face or a combination of both; they may be within one institution or across institutions. OLN will provide the centers with software that enables discussion boards, real-time chat capability and other features.

The possibilities are limitless, Fink said. For example, no learning community yet exists specifically for online instructors, and while the communities are primarily for faculty, they may also include business, industry or government employees as community partners. She also foresees eventually extending the communities to secondary education teachers. Topics may be within a discipline or cross-disciplinary.

There's a revolution going on in the ways students learn and the ways in which faculty must teach, according to Fink. “We're communicating in so many different ways,” she said, and learning communities offer faculty support and resources to meet those challenges.

Two strategies for accomplishing this—“leadership in learning” and “new media and emerging technologies”—are outlined in BGSU's Academic Plan.

Molnar pointed out that the demographics of students have also changed, and teaching must now be geared to a diverse audience. Learning communities can explore and share ways to address these new student populations, she said.

Two conferences are being planned for the new center. The kickoff this fall will bring multiple campuses together. The second, in the winter, will be a learning institute open to faculty from all institutions. A top-flight keynote speaker is planned, Fink said.

The University's commitment to learning communities was a factor in its being chosen for the new center, she added.

OLN, an initiative of the Ohio Board of Regents, is a consortium of 72 of Ohio's public and private colleges and universities. The network helps Ohioans access higher education; helps build partnerships among higher education, schools, businesses and communities, and promotes and supports e-learning in the state.

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(Posted May 26, 2006)