Coming to Terms: ALN
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We are not there yet. "When ALN courses and programs become as common as on-campus courses and programs and when support services are provided to all students, near and far," says Kobayashi, then ALN will be understood as "the basic medium for instruction (even when distance is reduced to near zero meters), because ALN means uniquely asynchronous learning communities."

Indeed, the creation of asynchronous learning communities motivated ALN from the beginning. Frank Mayadas, Sloan-C President, provides a brief history to help understand the holistic approach that distinguishes ALN:

In 1993, shortly after we started the Sloan program, we held a small meeting of people who had received grants, and a few people who were likely to get grants. We had maybe 20 people in the conference room at the Omni Hotel here in Manhattan-from Drexel, the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California-Berkeley Extension, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Cornell, Brown, and others. One question I raised with this group was: "What should we call this stuff we are trying to do?" I wanted to avoid "distance education" because at that time, most of it was correspondence, television and audio conferencing. Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff of New Jersey Institute of Technology had used the term "learning networks" already in publications, and we added "asynchronous" and called it ALN. The ALN term puts emphasis on everything that appeared to be important then, and which appears to be important now: Asynchronicity, Learning, and Networks (emphasizing networks of computers and networks of people learning together). Subsequently as the commercial internet exploded on the scene, computer networks became the internet, but the people networks idea survived. The ALN term still means something to me: asynchronous, instructor-led, cohort-style, emphasis on people-to-people interaction, relatively inexpensive course cost, and lower emphasis on expensive media.