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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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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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.

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The 2003 Sloan Survey of Online Learning polled academic leaders and was weighted to allow for inferences about all degree-granting institutions open to the public. When asked to compare the online learning outcomes with those of face-to-face instruction a majority said they are equal. Two out of every three also responded that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy. Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2002 and 2003 also looks at characteristics of online learners, student and faculty perceptions as well as how private and public institutions approach online learning.

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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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