Partner Institutions

The 4D Liberal Arts collaboration is a partnership between Oberlin College and Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio, and Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. The initiatve integrates the strengths and resources of two types of higher-education institutions: a residential liberal arts college and conservatory of music that draw students from across country and globe, and a two-year community college experienced in and committed to improving social mobility and fostering economic development in a county hit hard by the shrinking of the manufacturing sector. The Campana Center at LCCC and Oberlin College's StudiOC function as portals between these distinct educational worlds by virtue of their shared commitment to testing new curricular and educational models. The Campana Center includes a state-of-the-art makerspace as part of an engineering and entrepreneurship program. StudiOC offers clustered, thematic courses taught by teams of faculty from across the College’s academic divisions.

Lorain County Community College's Campana Center for Ideation and Invention is home to the second Fab Lab in the country after MIT, which coined the term and concept. Fab Labs are makerspaces designed to support their local communities by empowering community members to imagine, design, and build using the latest digital fabrication technologies. The strengths of the Campana Center include its cutting-edge technology, particularly in digital fabrication, its state-of-the-art facility, and its ability to “connect industry and academic development, spur entrepreneurship, and connect the arts to engineering and manufacturing.” It helps students train for jobs in new fields and local industries remain competitive by providing access to the latest digital fabrication tools. In what is described as a flipped institutional model, “industry needs drive program and degree offerings.” If, as many declare, the makerspace movement represents the fourth industrial revolution, the Campana Center is poised to be a leader in rapid prototyping and creation of new technologies ready for the market as well as an example for others interested in preparing individuals for the jobs of the future. It also has a mobile Fab Cab, an innovative mini makerspace on wheels that allows community members to experience the digital maker movement in their local environment.

Oberlin College and Conservatory's Center for Convergence (StudiOC) is a hybrid space and curricular program that aims to equip students with the intellectual skills to address the complex, seemingly intractable problems of our era. Students enroll in two or three courses linked to a theme or problem that they examine as a cohort from different disciplinary vantages. This contrasts with the traditional undergraduate model of unrelated courses in a semester. StudiOC engineers an intellectual experience where students think through and across disciplines, learning and applying knowledge and approaches from multiple fields to complex social, political, economic, or environmental challenges. Six StudiOC learning communities are offered each year. In addition to learning communities exploring such themes such as global public health, transitional justice, or immigration and sanctuary, StudiOC each year offers clusters that examine enduring questions related to human experience and human values in a multi-disciplinary fashion. StudiOC also encourages multi-disciplinary artistic production, drawing on Oberlin’s strengths in the arts, particularly musical performance and composition.