Computer technologies have become an integral part of higher education -- in addition to our very culture -- both inside and outside the halls of our educational institutions.

Many of our instructors make extensive use of the computer and place vast amounts of course materials on a course Web site. During a recent summer, economics professor Thom Mitchell (left, in image at left) and philosophy professor Pat Manfredi were among several faculty who experimented with a collaborative teaching-and-learning program.

Students in the College of Liberal Arts will use computers to complete at least some course assignments in many of their courses; they will use email to communicate with their professors and their classmates; in some cases, assignments will be collected electronically, graded electronically by the instructor and returned to the student electronically!

Liberal Arts CAIRL

The Computer-Assisted Instruction and Research Laboratory in the College of Liberal Arts at SIUC serves all of the departments in the college by providing computer lab space for undergraduate and graduate courses. Half of the CAIRL-CoLA houses Macintosh micro-computers where students are able to work on various types of class assignments; the other half of the CAIRL facility houses nearly two-dozen PCs that provide faculty and students access to the on-line library card catalogue, the Internet, and mainframe computer-assisted instruction materials.

Learn more about the CAIRL lab

New Media Center

The SIUC New Media Center is a state-of-the-art multimedia computer facility. It is designed to serve the needs of faculty and students who wish to explore the use of computers in teaching, research and multimedia production. It is a part of the New Media Center Alliance, an international non-profit organization of 100 universities and 10 corporations with headquarters in San Francisco.

Learn more about the New Media Center

Language Media Center

The Language Media Center serves the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Center for English as a Second Language and the Department of Linguistics by providing access to instructional technology for language study.

Learn more about the Language Media Center

In the Departments

In addition to the labs described above, many of the individual schools and departments within the College of Liberal Arts have their own computing labs and resources. You should visit the Web sites of the various units of the College for more information. You will find links to all of the COLA schools, departments and centers listed in the directory.