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Instructors, cont'd from page 5
“People builders”—Instructors fill a far more important role than being academicians. Shalni Gulati of City University, London gives a student perspective, that the role “is about helping us realize what we are capable of and help[ing] us get the confidence, resilience and opportunities to get there,” citing three teachers “who were essential in the building of 'me.'” Students construct themselves and their own knowledge, but instructors serve as a bridge—in some situations, the only bridge—between learners and the society in which they seek a place.

As instructors’ roles change, what is essential about instructors will change as well. There was widespread agreement that, as George Otte stated, “The

instructor's role as (mere) deliverer of information is at a dead end.” Some participants think that there will be a renewed emphasis on once-important role—for instance, Boria Sax of Mercy College sees a new need for and emphasis on mentoring, and Terri Buckner of UNC Chapel Hill proposes reconfiguring the instructor role by reconceptualizing courses so that knowledgeable facilitators focus on more complex reasoning tasks.

Practitioners in K–12, corporate training, and other sectors will arrive at different answers about how instructors are essential to the learning process. Re-examining this question for your context is worth the effort to gain a deeper understanding of how instructors are, and are not, essential to the educational experience.

Sloan Corporate-University Online Learning Workshop
New York City, January 25, 2005

Elaine Cacciarelli, Executive Director
Sloan Greater NYC Online Learning Center, Stevens Institute of Technology

Co-chairs Robert Ubell of Stevens Institute of Technology and Nancy Lewis of IBM welcomed representatives from corporate elearning and academic ALN programs to a comprehensive discussion of the need for close corporate-university partnerships in online learning. Given that the applicability of the Sloan-C quality framework with minor adaptations could benefit both the corporate and academic learning environments, several significant reasons emerged for pursuing joint follow-ups:

~Both learning environments need a basis for understanding and tracking learning quality.

~Compared with Sloan-C pillars, the Kirkpatrick 4-level model, which is liberally used by corporations, is somewhat limiting since it examines only the effectiveness of specific learning content and does not really take into account measuring the wider learning environment that is addressed by the five Sloan-C pillars.

~With large proportions of students from the academic learning environment feeding into industry, it would be very useful for both the corporate and academic worlds to better understand each other and form some commonality for measuring the quality of learning.

~The application of a commonly based model could likely accelerate the evolution of the quality of learning in both environments through cross learning and encourage further collaboration between corporate and academic learning professionals.

Sloan has already begun to formulate how to implement suggestions that emerged from the workshop, including collecting reactions, comments, recommendations.

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