F. Business Plan

Funds paid to the Network by Core Institutional Members will be administered through the CIRTL Networks administrative home, currently the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The CIRTL Network business plan intends to, first, obtain and provide substantial initial funds to transform graduate education at the 25 CIRTL Network partners, and second, transition the Network to a self-sustaining entity by mid-decade. Currently the business plan includes only Core Institutional Members, but it has the flexibility to incorporate revenue from Individual Members and externally funded special initiatives (e.g., with Affiliate Members).

Underlying Ideas

a. Membership in the Network as a Core Institutional Member carries with it responsibilities for:

i. developing and institutionalizing a local CIRTL learning community.
ii. providing funds and in-kind contributions to support the cross-Network learning community.

b. Developing or advancing sustainable local CIRTL learning communities is a long-term national investment in the preparation of the nations STEM faculty. Thus local and associated CIRTL central costs during the initial development phase (4 years) are appropriately supported in part by Federal and other external funding sources.

c. Institutions will be expected to provide their required in-kind contribution to the cross-Network learning community within 1 year of joining the Network (roughly the time to develop an in-kind contribution).

d. Ongoing local and cross-Network activities must become sustainable independent of external funding. The business plan builds toward such institutionalization after four years.

Local - University support for their local programs might include faculty and staff salary support, reduced teaching loads so faculty can teach CIRTL courses, office space and information technology. For the purposes of this business plan, these resources are not accounted for in the CIRTL Network budget.

Cross-Network - The business plan presumes that these activities will become supported primarily with funds and in-kind contributions from Core Institutional Members.

e. Individual Members will provide fees-for-services as appropriate.

Sample Budgets

The budgets in the following tables are meant to be illustrative, and are based on the experiences of the prototype CIRTL Network.

Table 2. Sample annual subcontract budgets for 25 Core Institutional Members, with funding provided by the NSF or other funding agencies. Each Core Institutional Member would receive such funding to develop new or enhance local CIRTL learning communities and programs for STEM future faculty. As proposed, funding would ramp down over the course of 4 years and be institutionalized thereafter.

Table 2. Sample 4-yr Subcontract Budget for Development of Local Learning Communities

Table 3. Sample budget for the support of the activities of the cross-Network learning community and management of the CIRTL Network.

It is anticipated that by 2013 some of the activities represented in this table would be conducted at several Managing Network Members. In that case, funds that appear in this table would be redirected to the Managing Network Member for the specific management task. For example, if a Managing Network Member institution took on the role of managing the CIRTL portal, the funds for the portal staff and technology would go to that institution through a subcontract.

Table 3. Sample Annual Expenses for Cross-Network Learning Community and CIRTL Central

Table 4. Sample Network revenue contributed by the Core Institutional Members over 5 years. In this plan, institutional dues ramp up to an estimated normal operations level in 2017.

Table 4. CIRTL Network Revenue