In other Sloan-C news, recipients of this year’s awards for excellence in online teaching and learning were recently announced.

The award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) by an Individual goes to Ray Schroeder, director of the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning, a unit of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The award for Excellence in ALN Teaching goes to Professor Mary Ann Koory who teaches an online Introduction to Shakespeare course for the University of California Berkeley Extension Online. The award for Excellence in ALN Faculty Development goes to the Illinois Online Network. The Excellence in Institution-Wide ALN Programming goes to the State University of New York Learning Network.

The awards will be presented at the 8th Sloan-C International Conference on ALN to be held November 8-10 in Orlando, Florida. This year’s conference features keynote speaker Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth professor of learning technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Additionally, conference attendees can choose to attend one of five of the following free pre-conference workshops as part of their conference registration fee: Improving Quality in Online Education, which includes a soon-to-be-published 100-page "Pillar Reference Manual;" Strategies for Improving the Faculty Experience in ALN; "Ideal: Making the Case for Success;" Promoting Interaction and Collaboration in Online Courses; and Getting Started: Online Teaching & Course Development.

Also, for those who have not visited the Sloan-funded Web Center for ALN Research lately, which is planned to be incorporated into a new Sloan-C web site that is currently in beta testing, 20 new papers have been added to the research database. These papers are empirical studies of the effectiveness of learning networks and have been published in a refereed journal or conference proceedings, in the English language.

Regarding future Sloan-C endeavors, an online workshop about case writing for online education purposes, as well a face-to-face workshop called "Breakthroughs in Business Education Online" are in the planning stages to be offered sometime during the 2002-03 academic year.

Director of Sloan-C John Bourne adds that this year the consortium will more than likely continue to focus on specialty areas, such as nursing and healthcare (see the August 2002 issue of the Sloan-funded Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks - JALN), business and engineering. "We are also going to work more on blended learning, assessments, industry interactions, and the first excursions into understanding how to deal with those places that are really interested in the for-profit aspects of online learning," says Bourne. "We are really starting to sound more like an education and outreach organization."