... From the Editors
A letter from the editors of the Sloan-C View

This issue reviews some Sloan Consortium initiatives relating to rethinking paradigms for teaching and learning:

• Blended Learning: Sleeping Giant reports on an April 2005 Sloan-C Workshop on Blended Learning and Higher Education led by Mary Niemiec and hosted by the University of Illinois Chicago that generated a strategic plan for reporting on issues that surround “the fundamentally new paradigm” of blended learning.
• What are the issues for which blending could offer solutions? (a question formulated by Peter Shea of SUNY University at Albany) rounds up some questions of senior academic leaders about the future of higher education.
• An Excerpt from a brainstorming session gives a glimpse of the intense collaboration at the Sloan-C Workshop on Blended Learning and Higher Education.
• In "Hot off the Blog," Ray Schroeder of the University of Illinois at Springfield looks at three articles related to the instructor’s role in online learning.

• In Are Instructors Essential? a synthesis of a Sloan-C listserv conversation, John Sener, Director of Sloan-C Special Initiatives, recommends rethinking our most basic assumptions about the importance of teachers to learning.
• In Sloan Corporate-University Online Learning Workshop, Elaine Cacciarelli, Executive Director of the Sloan Greater NYC Online Learning Center at Stevens Institute of Technology, reports on preliminary findings from an initiative to enable corporate elearning and academic ALN to learn from each other’s best practices and provide greater access and personalization to more learners.
• The new issue of JALN, 9:1, includes 7 papers with implications for practice and development, including a featured case study on learning objects.
• What is the Sloan-C Quality Framework? provides an excerpt of a framework you can adapt to help strategize progress towards goals with demonstrable evidence via metrics.
• Welcome to new and updated programs in the Sloan-C Catalog. Why not submit your ALN programs so visitors to the Catalog can see what distinguishes your programs?
• In Sloan-C Member News, UMassOnline reports continuing growth, and Quality Matters receives the Maryland Distance Learning Association’s distinguished program award for 2005.
• Upcoming online workshops are opportunities to learn and to network with colleagues worldwide. Join Sloan-C for the Copyright Compliance for Online Educators—Start Date: June 1, 2005. Sign up here to be notified of new events, and for more information,