About the Consortium

Welcome to the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL) web site. Founded in 2014, the Consortium is a partnership of:

Our mission:

LACOL leverages the power of consortial relationships to promote excellent and innovative teaching, learning, and research in the liberal arts, with a special emphasis on utilizing and adapting emerging technologies.  It prioritizes collaboration among its member schools, focusing on projects that they can accomplish jointly that would be less robust or impossible for any of them to undertake alone.  LACOL encourages experimentation to develop, share, and assess the most effective modes of digital teaching and learning.

Shared Goals of the Consortium:

  • To provide a framework for creative collaboration between our faculty, staff and students
  • To explore locally inspired, globally connected pedagogies for the liberal arts that will help our current and future students learn and thrive
  • To experiment with technologies that enable deeper engagement between faculty and students in the classroom and online
  • To enrich individual campus curricula, for example, through broader course offerings
  • To create more “porous classrooms” that will draw in diverse student, faculty and other voices through online exchange
  • To offer faculty development opportunities
  • To improve learning outcomes for our residential students

In working towards these goals, teams of faculty, librarians, technologist and academic support specialists are engaged across our digital network.

Together we:

  • Share knowledge, data, expertise and ideas through our website, gatherings and workshops, online forums and colloquia
  • Collaborate on multi-campus projects focused on solving commonly held problems
  • Experiment with new models of student-centered teaching, learning and research
  • Connect with each other to advance our mission as liberal arts colleges

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