Sloan-C Online Seminar on Access in May

You still have time to register for this online seminar as well as the student satisfaction seminar in June!

Widening access to more learners is fundamental to the evolution of online learning and essential for its success. Programs have evolved from an emphasis on providing access to courses and instruction to recognizing that access is an enterprise-wide issue. An even more fundamental challenge is how to enable prospective learners to be aware of and to evaluate the available learning opportunities. As practices for providing access evolve, measuring the quality of access helps practitioners better determine how best to improve access for the learners they serve.

Who is finding effective ways to interest prospective learners in online education, and how are they doing it? What effective practices are emerging for dealing with access as an enterprise-wide issue? What new ways of measuring the quality of access are being developed, and how useful are they?

Which new challenges and developments on the horizon are likely to change current landscape of access to online education?

The Sloan-C Third Thursday online seminar on Access will explore these and related questions of interest to seminar participants. Commencing May 1 with readings, the seminar is open for registration through May 15. For a fee of $79.95, participate in online discussions, and receive the preview access studies, Volume 4 of the quality series upon publication, and a synthesis of commentary from peer practitioners, register at: https://secured.sloanconsortium.org/
sloancseminars/registration/index.htm

Book Reviews
For complete reviews, please visit: http://www.sloan-c.org/
resources/reviews/index.asp

Handbook of Distance Education. Michael Grahame Moore and William G. Anderson, Editors. Malway, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 2003.

Corporate Universities: Lessons in Building a World-Class Work Force. Jeanne C. Meister. New York; McGraw Hill Trade, 1998.

Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education. William F. Massy. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 2003.

If You're Going
to San Diego

Be sure to attend the May 20 "Corporate and Higher Education Alliances For e-Learning," a special Sloan-C session about industry-wide partnerships between corporations and higher education creating competitive advantages. Visit http://www.sloan-c.org/
conference/index.asp for a registration discount code.

Shifts in the Economy*

Old Economy	New Economy
-One set of skills -Labor vs. management -Business vs. environment -Security -Monopolies -Plant, equipment -National -Status quo -Top-down	-Lifelong learning -Teams -Encouragement of growth -Risk taking -Competition -Intellectual property -Global -Speed, change -Distributed

*Berge, Zane L. "Planning and Managing Distance Training and Education in the Corporate Sector." Handbook of Distance Education. Michael G. Moore and William G. Anderson, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003

New and Noteworthy in Effective Practices

California State University, Chico is one of the many colleges and universities that are developing well-organized processes and tools to evaluate online courses. Chico State’s Rubric for Online Instruction is a tool that guides improvement of existing online courses or development of new online courses through comparison to quality standards. The rubric can be used as a self-evaluating tool by individual faculty or for campus-wide implementation; it provides clear guidelines on what makes an online course effective or exemplary. The course evaluation process also provides a non-competitive form of recognition through the institutional reward system for faculty doing exemplary work with online courses.

A team at Indiana University-Bloomington’s School of Continuing Studies has developed a group of repurposeable learning object templates designed to make it easier for instructors to provide interactive and highly experiential learning exercises. These templates are part of the TALON (Teaching and Learning Oriented Network) Learning Object System and are built around particular modes of teaching and learning, for instance visual learning, writing skills, critical thinking, time-revealed scenarios, case studies and empirical observation. Designing and describing the learning objects in terms of commonly used teaching and learning styles helps instructors readily understand and use these templates to design learning objects for their own courses. The templates are also designed to allow reprogramming for new applications in other courses and subject areas with little or no additional programming.

Visit http://www.sloan-c.org/
effective/index.asp to read more details about this and other replicable online practices. Submissions become eligible for annual Sloan-C Quality Awards.

[submitted by John Sener, Sloan-C Effective Practice Editor, Access]