ALN Anniversary: Surprises? Promises? Partnerships
A plenary panel at the 10th Sloan-C Annual International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks looked back on years of innovation and forward to radical changes.
Frank Mayadas said that Sloan’s earliest working assumption was to enable anyone the opportunity to learn anything online at any time affordably, and the best way the Sloan Foundation could foster innovation would be with incentives to institutions that would align with their own best purposes and interests. For the panel, greatest surprise is how well the idea works and how rapidly ALN is growing. Burks Oakley remarked that 11 years ago there was no internet and no graphical web browser, and zero percent of institutions of higher education had fully online courses; today, 80% of schools have online or blended courses. This is a record rate of change for higher education, said Oakley, and it is manifested in innovative sharing among faculty, constructivist pedagogy, and growing recognition of good practice. Despite uneven access to technology from home among students in the U.S., and great disparity of access in many nations, Tony Picciano applauds the fact that faculty, not just administrators, are taking leadership roles especially in the development of blended courses. Pointing out that groups vary widely in access to technology, it has been surprising, said Janet Poley, how rapidly people have gravitated from other
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technologies to learning via the internet; one effect of growth is that the lines between research and education are being blurred as we learn more about how we learn. Carol Scarafiotti concurred that ALN is opening doors like never before, empowering critical audiences of learners and teachers to understand pedagogy, faculty role change, instructional design, ‘consumers’ who expect immediate feedback, emerging new services and organizations, and control shifting from faculty to students in cooperative ways. Joel Hartman said that fast-paced diffusion of innovation spurs random progress, yet internal and external forces and energies at work in the environment call for a new agenda: “It’s not so much the goals that will change, but our awareness of new ways to meet the goals.” As we examine the social mission of ALN and what it means to society, the agenda will mean not just access to technology but using it meaningfully. Citing William Berquist’s The Four Cultures of the Academy: Insights and Strategies for Improving Leadership in Collegiate Organizations, Hartman said that internal and external partnerships are motivated first by mutual interests, then move to identifying needs, and finally to realizing and implementing benefits. What’s possible isn’t always doable unless partners identify self-interest, noted Mayadas, and the question is “What is the glue that holds interests together?” John Bourne responded that as the mainstream changes over the next five years, ALN’s positive spillover effects on higher education and the people part of networking mean finding overlapping interests and consolidating networks through channels such as Sloan-C’s special interest groups and publications.
Chaired by Gary Miller, Associate Vice President for Distance Education and Executive Director of the World Campus at The Pennsylvania State University and by Jacqueline Moloney, Dean of the Division of Continuing Studies, Corporate and Distance Education at UMass Lowell, the panel included Carol Scarafiotti, Executive Consultant for Online Learning at Rio Salado College and Dean, Emerita; Tony Picciano, Professor of Education and Leadership at Hunter College; Janet Poley, President and CEO of the American Distance Education Consortium; Burks Oakley, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs for the University of Illinois and Director of University of Illinois Online; Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies and Resources and Chief Information Officer at the University of Central Florida; John Bourne, Executive Director of the Sloan Consortium and professor at Olin and Babson Colleges; and Frank Mayadas, program officer for the Sloan Foundation and President of the Sloan Consortium.
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