At the nexus of education and technology, blended learning is growing rapidly. Integrating face-to-face and online learning, blending can enhance learning and optimize seat time. How can blending transform today’s learning environments? In response to this question, 24 practitioners at 16 colleges and organizations examine research, stakeholder perspectives and best practices in 13 chapters designed for multiple educational contexts such as: designing and delivering hybrid courses, student interaction and student satisfaction, strategies for training and preparing faculty and other related topics.

Edited by:
Anthony G. Picciano - Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York
Chuck Dziuban - University of Central Florida

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Elements of Quality Online Education, Volume 3 in the Sloan-C Series, is a groundbreaking study of important questions about quality in online learning from the perspectives of private, for-profit, and research university and college practitioners. What do learners like and dislike about online learning? What makes faculty happy and unhappy about teaching online? How can schools drive down costs and prices to achieve capacity enrollment while maintaining and improving the quality their distinctive missions have established? How can schools widen access to their programs by creating virtual environments that give timely and complete academic support and administrative services to build learning communities?

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Online education has become the leading modality for distance education, and academic leadership expects online enrollment to grow as much as 25% per year. Thus, a central challenge to the nation is how to engage communities to make education “an ordinary part of everyday life.” To address this challenge, leading scholars and practitioners from forty colleges, universities and organizations gathered at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s annual invitational summer workshop in September 2004. Workshop papers collected here in Elements of Quality Online Education: Engaging Communities, volume six in the annual Sloan-C quality series, include provocative responses to these questions: How can online pedagogy improve face-to-face pedagogy? How can asynchronous learning networks engage the core of higher education? How can the two worlds of academia and industry cooperate to contribute to a tenfold increase in online learning in the next ten years? What do we need to learn about the business of education?.

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The nineteen papers in this volume portray organizations that are negotiating the simultaneous demands of tradition, the status quo, and the transformation of higher education. These wisdom papers include views on the ways assessment guides improvement; on the potential of blended environments; and on transformations that will give new meaning to the Sloan-C quality pillars of learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, and faculty and student satisfaction.

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In the ten years since the inception of the Sloan Consortium, the field of online learning has entered the mainstream of higher education, making online learning a core ingredient of tomorrow’s educational paradigms. Now that digital natives are coming of age, the blending of on-ground and online education is continuous and unstoppable. Growing demands for wide choice suggest that the blended agenda presses us rapidly into new realms of inquiry. Thus, the title of this collection, the fifth volume in the Sloan-C series on quality, is Elements of Quality Online Education: Into the Mainstream. The 14 peer-reviewed studies in this volume provide guidance for effectively responding to the challenges facing higher education.

Also available in PDF format, CD-ROM and CD-ROM/Book

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Of value to practitioners in the full range of educational contexts, the sixteen wisdom papers in this collection include perspectives ranging from programs and institutions to effective practices to insights about the future of higher education as new models emerge that will improve learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, faculty satisfaction and student satisfaction. Each year, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation invites practitioners to a workshop to confer and share their practical research on specific challenges of importance to quality online education. These summer research workshops result in the publication of annual volumes in the Sloan Consortium quality series and in online workshops that use the annual volumes as a starting point for disseminating information and building knowledge with a wider audience.

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Elements of Quality Online Education: Practice and Direction, Volume 4 in the Sloan-C series (2002) provides an overview of the status of online education, examples of effective practices, and directions for research and development. Volume 4 also addresses these questions: What pedagogical practices promote effective learning online? What are the key areas for achieving cost effective quality in online programs? What services enable new populations of learners to access higher education? What motivates faculty satisfaction in online teaching? What practices assure student satisfaction?

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Elements of Quality: The Sloan-C™ Framework, Pillar Reference Manual is the collected wisdom of practitioners who improve the quality of learning in online programs. This Pillar Reference Manual shows how schools have applied the five pillars of quality-learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction in a flexible quality framework that can be used in the full range of academic contexts.

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An anthology of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded case studies on learning effectiveness and faculty satisfaction in online education at an array of universities and colleges. Fourteen case studies examine critical issues involved in online education- how well people learn and how satisfied faculty are.

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Volume 2 of Online Education focuses on Learning Effectiveness, Faculty Satisfaction and Cost Effectiveness from the perspectives of pioneer colleges and universities with fully online degree programs. 12 case studies examine critical issues involved in online education-how well people learn, how satisfied faculties are, and how costs are managed.

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