The students and their group leaders, often peer advisors or academic advisors or both, are the community in the model and these programs often make a important difference in providing students with a circle of friends in their first weeks on the campus as well as a good orientation to the university. However, while the students are provided with a valuable network of peers and a comfortable transition to college, there is usually little change whatsoever in the courses they are taking or in the larger curriculum. These are pilot offerings of learning community programs launched on either a small or large scale. Depending on the scale of these programs they can be nearly invisible or highly visible, but generally they are highly vulnerable, and are often under great pressure to work magically well the very first time out. The assessment agenda is particularly important in these programs because the pioneer balloonists, if you will, are having to gather information to work out the bugs and improve the program, and simultaneously to gather information to prove it at the same time, that is to prove that the program is living up to its promises and is worth the resources it requires.
Trial balloons are also vulnerable on the wider campus to stereotyping.
In academia we teach our students not to jump to hasty judgments or to stereotype and yet, all too often, with these trial balloons there is a generalizing from the particular. For example, a learning community linkage starts in women s studies courses, and across the institution learning communities are assumed to be some new feature of feminist pedagogy. Or the learning community effort starts in a developmental programs, so the LC idea is assumed to be only for remedial education, or a program is just associated with the personality of its strongest leader. The challenges for these trial balloonists are clarifying intentions, describing to others on campus what these intentions are, getting protection for enough time to develop program fully, and having resilience even if there are attempts to puncture the balloons. It takes years for any learning community program to gel in an institution.