SLOAN PROGRAM IN ANYTIME, ANYPLACE LEARNING: History and Additional Details for 2004 Directions

History and Status

              We began our program in 1992, at a time when just a few faculties around the country were experimenting with online education, and a single online degree program was available from an American institution, University of Phoenix. Over the past 11 years, Sloan has made grants, at the officer and trustee levels, and committed approximately $48M to the ALN program.   These break out as follows:

217 grants directly supporting projects at colleges and universities.

21 grants in support of planning activities, mainly preceding a project grant.

30 grants in support of dissemination and resource-sharing activities (mainly conferences and services provided through our Sloan-C web-site at Olin College of Engineering and Babson College in Massachusetts, www.sloan-c.org .

              The Sloan program, which basically launched online learning among traditional colleges and universities, has had a very significant national impact. A survey conducted this year by Jeff Seaman and Elaine Allen of Babson College (Wellesley, Mass.) under a Sloan officer grant provides the first glimpses with any detail, of the Sloan impact on the national ALN picture. It shows ALN to be a dynamic and growing form of education within the U.S. (and world-wide), one that now bears no resemblance to the small, unfocused and experimental efforts of 1992. Some specific elements from that survey, to which nearly 1000 accredited institutions contributed: (1) a pre-ponderance of chief academic officers now believe that online education is equivalent to the traditional classroom version and is likely to become even better; (2) about 1.6M learners around the U.S. enrolled in at least one online course in A/Y 02-03;   (3) enrollments are growing in excess of 20% per year.

              The Sloan strategy and continued support for the ALN program have been central to bringing about the beginnings of this transformation in opportunities for access to quality education across the country. We are however, only in the end-game of a very strong start. Much work lies ahead before we reach our program goal of making education widely available, anytime and anyplace, to anyone who wishes to learn.

Process, Chronology, and the Current state of Affairs

              Our program strategy has evolved over time. In the beginning (1992)/3) grants were difficult to place because so few institutions understood the ideas behind ALN. TV learning programs (interactive and non-interactive) and various kinds of self-study programs were quite established.   Their strengths and weaknesses were quite well understood.   In particular, the pedagogical approaches used in these modalities were well understood (e.g. the TV modality is the familiar lecture format projected over distance).   ALN was more of a mystery to faculty, partly because it is qualitatively so different from traditional lecture-style teaching.

              Very early in the program we sought out individual faculty who would be willing to convert one, or occasionally, a handful of courses, into ALN. These Stage I grants enabled an institution to get started and learn ALN, and they, along with the appearance of the web-browser (1994) and the commercial internet (1995), gave us, and the faculty involved, conviction that ALN really did work and had possibilities for large-scale implementation. We found that institutions could develop courses at reasonably low cost (currently $2000 to $5000 per course) and deliver them to remote learners with excellent success (learning quality, retention etc.). These were followed by Stage 2 grants which supported larger efforts (clusters of courses and full certificate and degree programs), and then Stage 3 grants which supported scale-up to large numbers of enrollments at schools like UC Berkeley, SUNY, University of Illinois, Penn State etc. As might be expected, there was a degree of overlap in these stages, so that some Stage I activity was still underway, as Stage 2 efforts got under way and then when we entered the more recent Stage 3 period, we more or less discontinued Stage 1 grants altogether and began to de-emphasize Stage 2 grants. Today, we continue to support the occasional full program, but generally only at an officer grant level. Most institutions are finding ways through internal funds, or other grant programs (e.g. NSF, Department of Education, Department of Labor).

Many different kinds of institutions have received grants, and a few are leaders within their categories. The largest ALN efforts are at University of Maryland (over 100,000 enrollments), SUNY (60,000), St. Leo of Tampa, Fla. (40,000) and University of Illinois (15,000), but community colleges are also doing very well (e.g. Rio Salado Community College reports 20,000 enrollments ). Among the high-profile private institutions, only Stanford, a Sloan-C member, is much of a presence (with enrollments mainly in their graduate engineering programs online, about 4,000). Lower profile privates are also performing well, e.g. Pace University of New York, enrolled approximately 5,000 in their programs.

              In the mid-nineties, simultaneous with the end-period of the Stage 1 grants, we began a branch to our program devoted to dissemination of ALN ideas, methods and techniques being developed by our grantees in this infant field. Within this sub-program, the First International Conference on ALN was held in 1994 in Philadelphia, a web-site was established in 1996 and the first edition of JALN (Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks) was published online that same year. Much has happened since. Sloan Foundation ALN grantees plus other institutions with courses, degrees or even an interest in ALN, are now invited to join Sloan-C or the Sloan Consortium which now numbers over 400 educational institutions. They practice, to varying degrees, evaluation of their programs according to the five Sloan-C ALN “Pillars”: Access, Learning Effectiveness, Faculty Satisfaction, Cost Effectiveness and Overall Student Satisfaction. This years ALN conference in Orlando, Florida (the 9 th International Sloan-C Conference) may attract as many as 600 attendees. JALN, the most prestigious journal devoted to asynchronous education, the Sloan-C Catalog, Sloan-C Views (an occasional newsletter which appears about 4 times a year) and a knowledge site (describing current effective practices for each ALN Pillar, collected world-wide by our Pillar Editors) are at our frequently visited site, www.sloan-c.org . Sloan-C also sends speakers to campuses that wish to learn more about ALN. The knowledge site is a useful complement to conferences, articles etc. because it quickly captures new and useful developments in this fast-moving field, and allows for dissemination of unpublished as well as published result, selected and organized by experienced professionals, the Pillar Editors.

              The Sloan emphasis on low-cost course development through the ALN model, was absolutely critical for the spread of online learning within higher education, for it enabled institutions to take advantage of resources they already had (e.g. faculty) and to not await resources and technology they did not have (e.g. cash and broadband). The Sloan emphasis on full-program development was equally important. Through this emphasis, institutions were encouraged to take steps towards offering of full degrees online, something unheard of in the early 90's. They could move forward with confidence, knowing that others in Sloan-C were doing the same. Finally, the dissemination and community-building efforts based around Sloan-C have become an increasingly important part of our strategy. Sloan-C, is now a home and a resource for a new class of professionals: faculty and administrators responsible for   ALN at their far-flung institutions. Sloan-C services serve to energize and empower this growing community by providing them with ideas, contacts, practices, and ALN scholarship which they can apply at their institutions.

Plan for 2004

              In the coming year, we plan to maintain our primary focus on accelerating ALN within mainstream colleges and universities. Important elements for this have been the dissemination and community-building activities anchored around Sloan-C. Much of this, but not all, is centered at Olin and Babson Colleges, physically contiguous institutions in Needham/Wellesley, Mass. in the coming year, we propose to continue supporting this very successful work (JALN and Sloan-C Views, our online journal and the occasional newsletter; the Sloan-C catalog, the speaker/consultant activity, the effective practices site, surveys etc.). In so doing, we will continue to strengthen and increase the community. As ALN increases in scale, new, unforeseen obstacles to growth will emerge, and this community will be central in overcoming these.

              Now that some degree of scale in ALN has been demonstrated, we will begin efforts to more precisely identify and address obstacles to real large-scale, i.e. something like 50% of a traditional campus-based school becoming   ALN. We will do this by supporting small efforts to identify and work-around significant obstacles to large-scale (eg. mechanisms for new faculty to be hired for ALN, high-lighting the cost-advantages of ALN, mechanisms for course- and faculty-sharing among institutions), and we will also attract some campus-based institutions to plan and begin moving towards a future (three to five years down the road) of a 50/50 ALN/classroom environment. In order to see real large scale at campuses, we think that the ALN goals for the campus (or system) will have to be aligned with the   institutional goals for the campus (or system) We therefore plan to ask that this alignment be specifically spelled out in proposals to us.

              ALN/classroom learning blends could also be important as a pre-cursor to large-scale implementations, and so we will begin to include blended cases in our program. The Sloan-C catalog now lists almost 600 full programs from member institutions. We will evaluate the possibility of making this a course-, as well as full-program catalog, since that seems to be important to many learners. That would mean putting up and maintaining ten to fifteen thousand courses online, a sizeable task. We will also remain vigilant for opportunities to add new programs that do not currently exist (e.g. bachelors degrees in mathematics, physics and engineering).

Status of ALN Projects for Industries and Other Specific Populations:

In addition to our primary focus on making typical college and university education widely available through ALN, we have also set a direction of demonstrating the usefulness of ALN for specific populations such as those in particular industries, U.S. Army personnel, low-wage adults and residents of the NYC Metropolitan area.

In 1998 we provided officer grants to CAEL (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) to work with telephone companies and the appropriate labor unions for the purpose of defining a curriculum for telephone network technicians to earn an A.S. degree.   That work was successful and in early 1999, Pace University began offering courses online.   The informal committee representing 5 founding telephone companies (Nynex, GTE, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech, SBC and U.S. West) and the unions (CWA and IBEW) is now known as NACTEL (National Coalition for Telecommunications Education and Learning) and CAEL continues as overall manager of the project, with Pace University as the sole course provider. NACTEL, which is now incorporated as a non-profit entity, has enough of an enrollment base and enough visibility and support   in the companies, to be able to continue indefinitely.

More recent trustee and officer grants have been applied to a project for the Electric Power Industry, overseen by 20 firms and the electrical workers union (IBEW), that will enroll 2500 in this, their second year. Bismarck State College, N.D. is the provider here for three A.A.S. degrees for technicians (generation, distribution and plant management system operator). This project, known as EPCE (Energy Providers Coalition for Education) is also managed by CAEL. Other trustee grants have established industry-specific educational offerings for the Finance Industry and in Nursing. They are enrolling about 1000 and 100 respectively in this their inaugural year.

Other ALN projects aimed at specific populations, include our assistance to the U.S Army and their prime contractor, IBM (formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers) in quality-related matters for the U.S. Army's eArmyU program (which is now serving about 35,000 soldiers, including those in Iraq), and a small effort to explore the applicability of (non-ALN) online learning for working adults at or near the poverty level.   In this latter case, we supported a small assessment effort through an officer grant, to augment a U.S. Department of Labor pilot project in New Jersey. This pilot, which runs to Y/E03, has enrolled 123 single working mothers in an online program to up-grade their office effectiveness (through acquisition of Microsoft Office, Accounting and similar skills). It appears at this point that nearly all the women will successfully complete the courses they enroll in and many will acquire certifications. Due to childcare, transportation and other obstacles, these women could not have completed these courses if traditional classrooms were the only option, and they have been clear in saying so. It also appears as though the online approach is cost-effective in this instance, in comparison with classroom training.

Finally we have been encouraging small colleges in the New York City Metropolitan area to build up their ALN capability. There are about 50 such institutions, and they collectively enroll about as many learners as the giant CUNY system. A trustee grant made it possible for us to establish a small center at Stevens Institute of Technology to play a local version of the role that Olin and Babson play for dissemination and outreach within the national ALN provider community. A few small institutions have been funded already, and other proposals are in preparation. For example, Audrey Cohen College in Manhattan (now Metropolitan College) has developed 12 ALN courses and is currently enrolling about 250 in these. Georgian Court College in New Jersey has also received a recent officer grant under this program.

Plan for 2004

We anticipate no new support for the NACTEL and EPCE projects, which are self-sufficient, and successfully marching forward, with increasing visibility and enrollments from their industries. We also do not anticipate additional Sloan support for the Nursing program, which is now being run by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). This program is much needed, but it is likely to show a slower growth rate because of the complexity of arranging clinical internships for the learners, and because nursing requires a participating institution within each state. Nursing ALN's therefore are a collection of institutions, very different from the NACTEL and EPCE examples.

We do see the possibility of some additional support for the Finance Industry project and possibly others such as a post-baccalaureate certification for radiology technologists, and manufacturing workers in the pharmaceuticals industry.

We plan to continue our advisory role with the exemplary eArmyU program, through a twice a year joint meeting between Army, IBM and a Sloan-organized committee of nationally recognized external experts.

We will also support attempts to disseminate all that has been learned in the New Jersey project on low-wage working adults and attempt to have online learning for this population institutionalized in all 50 states. State and federal programs now exist which can fund such a scale-up, but each state will need to learn about the New Jersey experience and how it can be applied in their circumstances. Our support would go towards outreach and dissemination of the knowledge created in the New Jersey pilot. In that spirit we are presently arranging a presentation for the National Governors Association meeting this December.

Finally we propose to continue the NYC Metropolitan area ALN program. We expect in 2004 that the Stevens center will organize two workshops, and will assist in preparation of five or six new small grants to local institutions. We expect about 1000 enrollments in this program by Y/E04.