I learned about Sloan-C when they asked me to create a webinar about Success Strategies for Online Students. This experience taught me that this organization offered some excellent resources for online education. According to the Sloan-C site, “The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is the leading professional online learning society devoted to advancing quality e-Education learning into the mainstream of education through its community. Sloan-C is dedicated to providing access to high quality e-Education to individuals, institutions, professional societies and the corporate community.”
Some of the best resources available on the site include:
- Survey Reports – Their data is often cited in articles about online education. An example is the statistic that over 6.7 million students have taken at least one online course in 2011. Online education is growing and this site offers some excellent reports to share that information.
- The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) – Download free articles about asynchronous online education.
- Advisory Services – Obtain information about how to program online materials.
- A Quality Scorecard for Administration of Online Education Programs – This scorecard can help administrators determine the quality of their education programs.
- Conferences – The consortium offers three annual conferences that focus on different areas of online learning.
- Webinars – The webinar I created was just one of many that utilize Elluminate to deliver important information about online education.
- Newsletter – Sloan-C offers a newsletter “to provide you with useful information about online learning, commentaries about the field and pointers to more details about the work of the Sloan Consortium. The Consortium currently has approximately 1600 active organizational members, including colleges, universities, consortia, and vendors.”
- Blog – Sloan-C has a blog, and also reposts education news from sources like Google News.
- Collaborative Workshops – “Each workshop is developed by practitioners for practitioners; enabling thousands of colleagues worldwide to collaborate cost effectively with peers and experts, via real-time and asynchronous meetings.”
- Symposium Series – This includes “4 interactive presentations on research of critical importance to educators engaged in advancing online and blended education.”
I was able to join Sloan-C through one of the universities for which I teach. Professors may want to check with their universities to see if they have access. For more information regarding membership to Sloan-C, click here.
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