A. Frank Mayadas, Ph.D. At the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dr. Mayadas is involved in a number of areas: online education, globalization of industries, industry studies, and career choice in technical fields. He started the Sloan online learning program in 1993. This program (known as Asynchronous Learning Networks or ALN) has had a profound impact in moving the field forward. Members of the Sloan Consortium now number over 1400. Dr. Mayadas has been a keynote speaker at several distance education conferences and has testified before Congress on web-based learning.