The Sloan Survey of Online Learning
Jeff Seaman, Ph.D.

The Sloan Consortium is just completing a comprehensive national study of online learning in Higher Education. Working from a representative sample of all United States institutions of higher education, this study has collected data on attitudes and practices from over 990 institutions.

The Sloan Consortium would like to thank all the institutions that took the time to respond to our study. The information you have provided will allow us to publish comprehensive and up-to-date study of the nature and extent of online learning.

First Results
While analysis process has just begun, we can provide you with some summary tables of what we are discovering.

Online versus Blended
The study used the Sloan definitions of online and blended courses, where at least 80 percent of the course content had to be delivered online to be considered an "online" course, and between 30 and 80 percent delivered online to be considered a "blended or hybrid" course. Overall, well over half of the entire sample provides both at least one online and one blended course (56.4%). An additional 16.0% offer online courses, but no blended courses, while 8.9% offer blended but no online. Overall, only 18.7% of all the institutions did not offer either type of instruction.

Public institutions are much more likely to provide online courses than are private schools.

When we examine these numbers by the control of the institution (public or private), we see that the public institutions are way out in front—with twice the proportion offering both online and blended instruction than the private institutions. Only 2.4 percent of all public institutions did not offer either type of course, compared to a quarter of all private, non-profit schools. About half of the for-profit schools do not offer either type of courses. Unlike the public institutions, where virtually all offer both online and blended courses, the private schools are much more likely to offer only one type of instruction or the other.

Overall, over half of all three types of schools offer online courses, either alone or in combination with blended offerings. However, the individual percentages range from a low of 47 percent for for-profit schools to over 93 percent for public institutions.

Online Degrees
The strong public/private differences we saw for courses offerings are mirrored in the results of the distribution of those who offer an entire degree program online (using the Sloan definition of having at 80% of the degree program content delivered online). Public institutions are over twice as likely to offer such a degree program than either type of private institution. The for-profit schools are more similar to the nonprofit schools in this aspect on online learning that there were for the provisions of courses.

Next steps
The Sloan Consortium will continue to report on the results of this study of the next several months. Planned reports include an estimate of the total number of students learning online and an investigation of the attitudes towards online learning.