As part of the CITL's mission to promote transformative learning experiences for IUB instructors, the CITL sponsors multiple Learning Communities each year. Learning Communities at Indiana University Bloomington are cohorts of instructors, often from different disciplines or fields of study, who ask questions about teaching and learning, try out teaching innovations, assess student learning, create new models of practice, and publish scholarship about their work. Each community shares a question, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic, as members deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. Members engage in scholarly teaching and student-centered learning, collaborating within a collegial framework that offers peer review and support.
Learning Communities meet once or twice a month, most often for the academic year (although some are one-semester groups), and each community has two types of outcomes—individual changes to one's own practice, and a group "give back" to the larger IUB teaching community. All IUB faculty members, both tenure track and non-tenure track, are eligible to participate in Faculty Learning Communities; all graduate students are eligible to participate in Graduate Student Learning Communities (and we do have some shared communities that include instructors in various positions).