... From the Editors
A letter from the editors of the Sloan-C View

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