In that spirit, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-sponsored consortium publishes an "Effective Practices" website that enables education providers to share teaching and learning best practices and insights that are based on the "five pillars" of quality in online education: student satisfaction, access, learning effectiveness, faculty satisfaction and institutional cost effectiveness.

Manager of the Effective Practices website Janet Moore explains that its primary purpose is to showcase quality in online education and support it with empirical evidence. The consequences are twofold: visitors to the site get to review best practices that could possibly be replicated at their own institution, and the world of online teaching and learning, in general, has a home that publicly substantiates its effectiveness and quality.

Content for the site comes from form-driven web pages where educators submit in-depth information about their best practice under one of the five pillars. The information is then reviewed and edited by one of five "pillar editors" before being officially posted to the website. All of the five pillar editors are experts in the field of online learning.

Pillar editors also frequently act as consultants during the editorial process. Educators openly discuss some of the challenges they face in developing best practices for their online classes and programs.

The end result is a continuously growing compendium of effective practices that are currently registered inside a hierarchy of various subcategories listed under the five pillars. Under the student satisfaction pillar, for instance, there are categories labeled "interaction with faculty," "interaction with students," "learning community involvement," and "academic and administrative services."

"I think they are helpful to consortium members, or anyone who looks at the site who wants to get ideas about how to do things differently or better," says Moore. "Because of the Internet, you can now communicate these things worldwide."

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