Elements of Quality Online Education cation

Introductionworkshops and publications.In fact, reports George Otte of the City College of New York in “Using Blended Learning to DriveFaculty Development,” the virtues of blended learning—heightened interaction, convenience, expandedenrollments, efficiencies of classroom space—are engaging mainstream faculty in building communityand knowledge about online instruction, a critical step to full integration.Chuck Dziuban and colleagues at the University of Central Florida report in “Higher Education, BlendedLearning and the Generations: Knowledge is Power—No More” on another kind of blending. Faculty andstudents from at least four generations—each with distinct learning preferences—engage with each otherin the same online and face-to-face classrooms. Learning among various generations means that the timehonoredmetaphors we use for education are changing, so that we may learn to think of education asteamwork.In “Adding Clicks to Bricks: Increasing Access to Mainstream Higher Education,” Raymond E.Schroeder of the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) and Burks Oakley II of the University of Illinoisdemonstrate that providing a wide range of quality online degree programs to individuals who otherwisewould not be participating in higher education is truly democratizing higher education.C. How can the Two Worlds of Academia and Industry Cooperate toContribute to a Tenfold Increase in Online Learning in the Next Ten Years?Introducing this challenge to the workshop Frank Mayadas, President of the Sloan Consortium andprogram officer for the learning anytime anywhere program of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and RobertUbell of the Stevens Institute of Technology explained that:Both academic online learning and corporate e-learning rely on the internet and web technologies,and their approaches appear similar at a superficial level. In fact however, the academic andcorporate implementations for online learning are quite different. This is not surprising given themotivations, resources and history of the two sectors. In other words, each sector appears to havesettled on practices that most suit their particular applications. Nevertheless, we think it isdesirable that the “two worlds” be brought closer together, so that each can progress to its goalseven more rapidly for the benefit of academe, the corporate community, and society as a whole.Providing an overview of a global company’s e-learning structures, Richard Benner reports in“Implementing Curricula Using a Variety of Learning Modalities at Liberty Mutual Group” that theSloan-C pillars of quality are effective as metrics for Liberty’s learning strategy that “emphasizes trainingthat is relevant to employees, helpful to business, and develops employee abilities via emerginginstructional technologies.”Mutual benefits to corporations and to schools evolve come from their engagement with each other. In“Instructional Technology Graduate Programs in Support of Corporate E-learning,” Barbara Lockee andMichelle Reece of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University assert that “Academia must findways to weave interactions with business partners into the fabric of their missions and activities,” findingthat faculty and students appreciate engaging with corporate e-learning to stay current and to applyacademic learning to real world opportunities.9