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A letter from the editors of the Sloan-C View
This issue of the View features
excerpts from a Sloan-C listserv conversation about whether
online learning is more than the latest form of distance
education. . . is it more than old wine in new bottles?
In May, at the Sloan-C ASTD workshop on Corporate
and University Alliances, Frank Mayadas explained
that the internet is a radical discontinuity for
business and for learning. Plato recognized
the invention of writing as such a radical discontinuity,
just as Edison recognized that electricity would
change the world. As silicon
technology advances to a price point that provides
widespread internet access, we will experience
things never before possible (Starr Roxanne Hiltz
and Murray Turoff. Network Nation: Human Communication
via Computer. MIT Press, 1978.)
Today, an
estimated 10% of all higher education occurs through
ALN, and this percentage is growing exponentially
as people realize the power of:
- Instant distribution
- Instant aggregation
- Interactive, multiparty, multidirectional,
multimedia communication that is archivable
and retrievable
- Ready revision, refinement, and updating of information
- Rapid feedback from many users on testing, process, products
For these radical innovations, the term "Asynchronous Learning Networks" (ALN) conveys the learning potential inherent in online interactive people networks.
Jeff Seaman reports on early, representative
results from a Sloan-C survey of higher education, revealing that nearly
90% of schools offer
blended or fully online courses. Indeed, Mark Kassop of Bergen Community
College, Thomas Edison State College, eArmyU and the New Jersey Virtual
Community College Consortium finds that learning online surpasses the
traditional classroom in specific ways.
John Sener reports on effective practices that are eliminating barriers,
enabling new populations of learners to access electronics and chemistry
laboratories, and using the features of face to face and online learning
in blended delivery models. As visits and postings to the Sloan-C effective
practices site demonstrate, people are searching for and finding innovations.
John Bourne and Steve Schiffman provide a primer on opportunity analysis
and invite you to join a Sloan-C forum for entrepreneurial thinking.
The interdependent Sloan-C quality principles emulate the well-known
features of continuous quality improvement (CQI), which uses feedback
from customers, partners and employees to improve products and processes.
As applied to higher education, the CQI quality goal is to scale programs
to achieve capacity access through attention to learning effectiveness,
affordability for learners and providers, and faculty and student satisfaction.
Sloan-C members demonstrate these features of quality with empirical
data as proof of effective practice.
You are welcome to join and to visit Sloan-C soon and often.
Best Regards,
… for the Sloan Consortium
Frank Mayadas,
John Bourne and
Janet Moore
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.
You are welcome to join Sloan-C: http://www.sloan-c.org
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