In 1997, Frank Mayadas, President of Sloan-C, argued that any learner who engages in online education should have, at a minimum, an education that represents the quality of the provider's overall institutional quality. Any institution, he maintained, demonstrates its quality in five inter-related areas - learning effectiveness, access, cost-effectiveness and institutional commitment, faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction. These five have become Sloan-C's Five Pillars of Quality Online Education, the building blocks which provide the support for successful online learning.

In this section, you can search for effective practices by Sloan-C pillars, and/or subtopics within them. Please note that many similar subtopics apply within one or more pillars. When this is the case, the subtopic will be followed by parentheses containing capital letters referencing the pillar, to indicate the practices in that subtopic are specific to that pillar.