A Philanthropy Puts Millions Into Asynchronous LearningA Chronological Sampling of Grants by the Sloan Foundation

Sloan Foundation grants emphasize on-line programs that create a sense of community

Northwest Technical College, in Minnesota, is using distance education to deal with a dire shortage of nurses in the region. Over the Internet, the college is training nursing-home aides from rural communities in North Dakota and Minnesota to become licensed practical nurses.

Half a continent away, New York University is hoping to build an entire business around its distance-education courses. Last month, N.Y.U. announced that it would spend $1.5-million to create a profit-seeking subsidiary that will market Internet courses. It also said it may someday take the company public.

These seemingly disparate efforts -- and dozens of others -- have something in common: Their growth has been financed in part with money from an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program aimed at making higher education available to students without tying them to a particular location or time.

Over the past five years, the foundation’s Asynchronous Learning Network has made grants totaling nearly $27-million. Sloan, which focuses most of its efforts on science and technology, awards a total of about $50-million in grants a year.

Little-known outside of education-technology circles, the asynchronous-learning program has helped to spark an enthusiasm for virtual education that shows no sign of abating. Some of the country’s best-known or most-ambitious distance-education programs, including Pennsylvania State University’s World Campus, the on-line program of the University of Illinois, Western Governors University, and the California Virtual University, have received Sloan money.

The foundation also supports smaller-scale projects, like the nursing program at Northwest Technical and a program for on-campus students at Brown University that makes chemistry-course materials and teaching assistants available to undergraduates at night, on weekends, and at other times when they aren’t in class.

Sloan also sponsors a scholarly journal and a news magazine -- both on line -- devoted to asynchronous learning. The two publications, along with links to discussions, are on the network’s World-Wide Web site (http://www.aln.org).

The foundation holds an annual conference in New York City, where some 550 grantees, would-be grantees, and others gather to trade ideas about the field. This year’s conference, the fourth, takes place November 13 to 15.

“Our goal is to keep pressing for a world in which anyone can learn at any time,” says A. Frank Mayadas, who directs the asynchronous-learning program.

He came to Sloan in 1993, after a 30-year career at I.B.M. in research and development -- including a stint under Ralph E. Gomory, who became president of the Sloan Foundation in 1989. Mr. Mayadas conceived the program soon after coming to Sloan, and has been running it ever since.

At first, he recalls, he felt a lot like a salesman, trying to persuade colleges that asynchronous-learning programs were worth creating. Computers weren’t as inexpensive then as they are today, he notes, and the Web hadn’t yet come into common use.

Early grants went to Drexel University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, among others, which were experimenting with delivering information-science courses to students at their jobs or homes. Mr. Mayadas then began traveling farther from the foundation’s New York City headquarters, hoping to locate more institutions that might be interested.

Five years and some 125 grants later, the foundation has established itself as a major force in the field. “Sloan made some models for other people to look at,” says Burks Oakley II, director of UI-OnLine, the distance-learning program of the University of Illinois system. It also “created some environments to help share those models.”

Five years of such efforts have left Mr. Mayadas with some strong notions about what works -- and what doesn’t work -- in creating educational options that aren’t tied to a set time or place.

In considering proposals, he looks for those that will create opportunities for students to interact with each other and their instructors. He likes programs that create communities, or “networks,” of learners.

The involvement of faculty members is also critical. The Asynchronous Learning Network, or A.L.N., as it is commonly known, is aimed at creating options for students who can’t attend traditional classes -- whether because of their locations, job or family commitments, or physical disabilities. It does not pay for courses that merely have a computer component.

“If I fund a project in A.L.N., it can’t just be on-line publishing,” Mr. Mayadas says. Nor is he interested in supporting programs that would package lectures by star professors into fancy interactive products. “That’s not our model. You can hand out CD-ROMs till you’re blue in the face. I don’t think most people will learn that way.”

He also routinely rejects proposals in which courses would be delivered in scheduled television broadcasts, proposals that seem too expensive, and proposals that seem too complex.

That last factor isn’t insignificant. In fact, Mr. Mayadas says, one of the appealing aspects of proposals made by the State University of New York was a plan to use one software program, a customized version of Lotus Notes, for the entire SUNY Learning Network. “The button that a student clicks on to submit an assignment is in the same place for every course,” says Christine E. Haile, associate provost for technology services.

The SUNY program, now in its fourth year, began with university-system funds, but was able to expand rapidly, having received more than $2.8-million from the Sloan Foundation. The program now includes some 200 courses, from 37 of the system’s 64 campuses.

Some of the Sloan money goes to operate an electronic chat room, in which professors can share concerns and questions about their on-line teaching. SUNY also runs workshops to show professors how to convert their courses to on-line formats.

A number of other grantees say Sloan money allowed them to expand their projects far more quickly than they could have without the foundation’s backing. Four years ago, for example, the University of California at Berkeley Extension offered a single on-line program, a certificate in managing hazardous materials. Today it offers 100 courses, in a wide range of fields, through America Online. The extension program has received about $2.6-million from Sloan.

Drexel officials say the support from the foundation gave them the financial cushion to start an on-line master’s-degree program with very small classes, and to take the time to evaluate the reliability of software products that they would eventually incorporate into the program, which is aimed at corporate employees.

Drexel, which now provides the information-systems degree to 105 students from 20 companies, says the program’s revenue more than covers its costs, an accomplishment that few other distance educators have matched. The $2-million-plus from the A.L.N. program was a big factor in that success, officials say.

At Northwest Technical, where the first 11 nursing students are due to graduate from the on-line program this month, officials are using a $30,000 Sloan grant to help pay the salary of the program’s director.

Joyce Hagen, a grants officer for the college, met Mr. Mayadas and other distance-education experts at the 1996 A.L.N. conference. “You just get plugged in to who’s really the best in the country,” she says. She invited one of those new acquaintances to serve as an outside evaluator on an application -- unsuccessful, as it turned out -- for a grant from another source.

One reason she enjoys working with Sloan, Ms. Hagen says, is that it requires comparatively little in the way of red tape. Mr. Mayadas reviewed her proposal and helped her to refine it in a telephone conference call. That informality is part of the A.L.N. program’s reputation, as is Mr. Mayadas’s readiness to work closely with applicants as well as grantees.

Applicants need not submit a formal proposal to begin discussions, notes Arlene Krebs, an instructor in new technologies for several colleges in New York City and the author of The Distance Learning Funding $ourcebook (Kendall Hunt Publishing). “Frank prefers for you to send him an e-mail,” she says.

Sloan is also distinctive, she says, for its focus on approaches to asynchronous learning rather than on content. Either Sloan or, say, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation might support a nursing program, but “Sloan will fund it only on line,” she says. “Kellogg will fund it in any medium.”

Mr. Mayadas says he does try to choose programs in which content matches up with the science-and-technology focus of the foundation. But A.L.N. grants have gone to non-technical programs, too.

What’s more important, he says, is involving a wide range of institutions:community colleges, four-year public institutions, Ivy League universities, and non-credit operations, like the Berkeley extension program. “What we’ve tried to do is cover the waterfront -- to defang the argument that ‘yeah, on-line learning, that’s only good for engineering.’ It’s good for everything.”

He’s interested in programs that involve asynchronous teaching on a large scale. Sloan trustees have just authorized a $500,000 grant to Pace University and others to help create an on-line associate’s degree in telecommunications, in cooperation with several companies and unions in the industry. Pace hopes to have as many as 3,000 students enrolled by 2002.

Some grantees are wealthy in their own right -- like Cornell, New York, and Stanford Universities -- and don’t seem like obvious candidates for philanthropy. But Mr. Mayadas says giving them grants serves the foundation’s larger purpose. “They fit our profile” and help to prove “that even an Ivy League school” can use asynchronous learning, he says.

He is also untroubled by the idea of an institution’s using Sloan philanthropy as leverage for a commercial venture, as may be the case at N.Y.U. Much of what it has learned as a Sloan grantee will come into play as it creates a subsidiary to sell Internet courses. Mr. Mayadas says N.Y.U. may simply be ahead of other grantees on the same curve. “In the end, they have to find some way of being self-sustaining.”

An issue that does concern him is the deep resentment that many faculty members feel toward distance education and other out-of-classroom teaching programs. A continuing priority for the A.L.N. program is to support projects that will help win those academics over. “We need more innovation in the pedagogical methods,” he adds, so that instructors don’t have to keep re-inventing techniques, and good approaches can be passed along. “I don’t want it to be more work.”

Some proposals that be approved in the next round of grants -- to be announced in December -- should address faculty concerns, as well as his own continuing questions about student satisfaction.

In addition to influencing the virtual-education field, the A.L.N. program has swayed federal policy. The lessons of the Sloan program, and others, encouraged the Clinton Administration to create “Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships” for inclusion in the recently reauthorized Higher Education Act.

The idea that off-campus learning “does not have to be a solitary activity” was an important underpinning of the new program, says Thomas A. Kalil, senior director of the White House National Economic Council. The partnerships program, for which Mr. Mayadas is an adviser, will receive $10-million this fiscal year, to provide grants to colleges and companies to develop asynchronous-learning programs.

That agenda-setting role is in character for Sloan, according to Mr. Oakley, the Illinois distance-learning director. The foundation “has a history of going into a field and jump-starting it,” he says, recalling its support of programs to involve more women and minority-group members in the field of engineering.

Sloan, which has assets of more than $1.1-billion, was created in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. An engineer by training, he was the chief executive of General Motors from 1923 to 1946 and chairman of its board for 10 years after that.

Still, with so many colleges and private education companies racing to create distance-education programs and on-line learning operations, is there still a crying need for a philanthropy to spend millions to add to the momentum?

Absolutely, says Mr. Mayadas. “A lot of the interest remains misguided. ‘Neat stuff’ on the Web isn’t enough. Show me how the students will interact and learn.”

By the end of this year, he estimates that A.L.N.-financed programs will have reached about 10,000 students and 500 faculty members. That’s gratifying, he says, but it’s “still peanuts compared to the major things that on-campus programs do.”

So funds for the Asynchronous Learning Network will continue to flow.

“I’ll get out of this whole program as soon as I’m convinced we’ve crested the hill,” Mr. Mayadas says. If, four years from now, Sloan can claim credit for a couple of projects that have enrollments in excess of 10,000 students, and catalogues of 400 to 500 courses leading to 15 or 20 degree programs, then “I would say you’ve got something that’s hard to ignore.”

New Jersey Institute of Technology: $697,422 for a project using computer conferencing and video technology to reduce the time students take to graduate and to create a bachelor’s degree in information systems for people who prefer to learn at home. Awarded in June 1993.

Cornell University: $109,370 for a project to introduce self-paced learning in physics and to broaden the range of career options for physics majors. Awarded in October 1993. A second grant of $153,700 was awarded in June 1994.

Pennsylvania State University: $12,000 to conduct market research and make industry connections for an Asynchronous Learning Network certificate program in acoustics. Awarded in June 1995. Penn State received an additional grant of $545,000 to create the certificate program in December 1995, and has since received two additional grants, totaling $1,330,000, for its World Campus distance-learning venture.

University of Maryland University College: $219,449 to develop and offer 10 A.L.N. courses in accounting. Awarded in June 1996.

The Johns Hopkins University: $250,000 to develop A.L.N. courses and offer a full master’s degree in public health. Awarded in July 1997.

The University of Oxford: $30,000 for a project studying how to market and distribute selected Sloan-financed A.L.N. courses and programs in Europe. Awarded in July 1997.

Salish Kootenai College: $15,000 to convert six courses into an A.L.N. format. Awarded in March 1998. The college was awarded an additional $15,000 in July 1998 to support a conference on the applicability of A.L.N. for American Indian students.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Page: A23