The IU Northwest Center for Innovation and Scholarship in Teaching and Learning (CISTL) provides leadership, encouragement, and support for innovativeness and scholarly attention to quality teaching and learning. CISTL's professional development activities, services, collaborations, and investigations are designed to invite, value, and reward faculty excellence in teaching.

CISTL is one of the eight teaching centers in the IU System and participates in a Centers' Network, which ties it very closely to the technological and pedagogical goals of the entire university.

CISTL delivers high quality professional development activities, which are tied to the academic excellence goals of the campus and promote the scholarship of teaching and learning. Four major thrusts of the Center to improve teaching and learning are:  instituting quality online course offerings taught by faculty who are professionally trained to design and deliver engaging, collaborative, and technologically appropraite learning experiences for their students; increasing active learning and collaborative classroom strategies; and integrating technology into instruction effectively.

The Center could not accomplish these goals alone, so it does so through internal and external collaborations with Academic Affairs, the Faculty Organization and several of its committees, Instructional Technology, and the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET).