Are the costs indeed worth the benefits? Certainly many institutions are satisfied with incremental changes on campus that have not required significant new investments to bring them about. The danger is that bricks-and-mortar universities will become mastodons. How long will parents and students be satisfied with static lectures in large rooms? How long will faculty be content with not having the expertise and technical help to exploit the host of new digital libraries that can support and even change their ways of teaching? What happens to those graduates in the job market who have been taught basic IT skills, but have not incorporated IT into all phases of their learning? It seems time to examine the possibility of collaboration rather than competition- to recognize that many students will continue to leave home to spend four to five years as undergraduates but are disadvantaged if "traditional" institutions fail to exploit the strengths and opportunities of distance learning.

Faculty critics of distance learning have charged that online education has become a commodity, separate from and competing with traditional higher education and isolated from the human contacts so important in teaching. That was a worry of some of our UIUC/GSLIS faculty before we began LEEP. It is no longer. LEEP has brought tangible economic benefits that support on-campus faculty in both teaching and research. Faculty use technology easily; they prize the quality of students who enroll in distance programs; all faculty are doing better and more significant research; and they are innovative, not fearful of change. Perhaps the greatest transformation is the sense of energy around the School and pleasure we take as we see the results of successfully linking on-campus and distance students

[2] http://www.drexel.edu/senate/
chronicle_04-13-01.htm

[3] For a further discussion of alternative ways of assessing costs, see Leigh S. Estabrook, "Rethinking Cost-Benefit Models of Distance Learning," Elements of Quality Online Education, Volume 3 in the Sloan-C Series (2001).

EdPath Covers
Sloan-C Workshop

The October 15 issue of Educational Pathways, a paid-subscription monthly newsletter covering higher education distance learning and teaching, will feature a review of the recent ALN Sloan-C workshop held in Lake George, NY on September 24-27.

The workshop featured overviews and case studies of each of the five pillars of quality in online education: learning effectiveness, institutional cost effectiveness, access, faculty satisfaction and student satisfaction.

Editor and Publisher of Educational Pathways, and Sloan-C member, George Lorenzo, is writing the review. For more information and to subscribe to Educational Pathways, please visit http://www.edpath.com/
sloan-c.htm.

Elements of Quality Online Education

To Order Your Copy
To order books in the Sloan-C series, visit http://www.sloanconsortium.org/ sloanCseries-order/; contact Kathryn Fife, at 781-292-2524, or email kathryn.fife@olin.edu

The third volume in the Sloan Consortium Series on quality in online education is now available. At $34.95, Elements of Quality Online Education, Volume 3 is designed to share knowledge among practitioners engaged in online learning. It contains 187 pages of documented, peer-reviewed, empirical case studies of programs in private, public, and for-profit schools ranging from two-year to major research universities.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commissioned the studies from selected institutions that lead the industry in online learning. In the only series of its kind, the volumes provide insider perspectives on how successful programs develop quality while scaling up to meet demand. In each case study, authors explain how their colleges and universities build successful online programs by observing the five elements of quality known as the Sloan-C pillars: learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, faculty satisfaction and student satisfaction.