Project Specialty Asynchronous Industry Learning (SAIL) is a League for Innovation in the Community College project that is setting out to promote access, exchange, and dissemination of specialized industry-driven programs offered at a distance.

Sponsored with a $375,000 seed grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, both for-profit and non-profit providers of specialty workforce-development distance-education courses and programs could stand to benefit from this innovative initiative aimed at meeting local learning needs in communities across the country.

"We want to find ways to drive asynchronous courses that are industry specific, often regionally specific, and make them accessible to community colleges around the country," says League President Mark Milliron. The recipients of such courses can then "wrap their general education courses and other things around it, use it for credit or for non-credit programming, provide training- in essence, create a kind of asynchronous learning workforce development exchange program."

"One of the understandings we have with the League is that they post some generic agreements that are brokered between institutions," says Mayadas. Part of the goal of the first phase of Project SAIL is to develop a catalog of learning exchange resources, such as model articulation agreements, sample transaction models and customized exchange agreements. An example of one Project SAIL program cost is $85 per student, per credit hour, with the home institution receiving the FTE for each student participant.

Since launching in June of this year, Project SAIL has posted eight specialty associate’s degree programs, 11 certificate programs and more than 100 industry-specific courses on its Web site, all of which are in their final stage of negotiations and could be ready to accept students at the partnering institutions as early as this upcoming spring semester. For example, some of these asynchronous programs include an accounting certificate, a criminal justice certificate, an HVACR technology certificate, an electric power technology program, and a funeral director certificate.

Previous to launching Project, SAIL, the League hosted a "director’s workshop" at a League conference held in October 2002 in which "we invited a lot of the folks who we knew were doing unique things in workforce development and asynchronous learning," says Perez.

"SAIL takes into account that there are significant benefits for students to take these courses from their local institution, even if they are online, especially community college students," says Perez. As noted on the SAIL Web site, "students are able to access high-quality online learning options while retaining services at their home institutions, such as advising, financial aid, tutoring, computer lab access, career guidance services and local placement services."

"With all the funding challenges today, you can only develop or focus on three to four industry trends," Perez says. "If you can eliminate all of the budget requirements, if you can work through some of the negotiation terms so that you can immediately offer some unique, industry-specific courses that meet some unique trends, that is a significant bonus to community colleges."

Perez adds that her research into the hidden costs of distance learning* shows that, on average, "it takes approximately seven years for any kind of return on investment for workforce development financing." Long-term financing of course development for core subjects such as English Composition is a feasible business model, but for specialty courses, the ROI model is not the same. "The workforce cycle can change quickly," says Perez, pointing to recent layoffs at such large corporations as Motorola and Intel. "Keeping up with such cycles in workforce development is a huge challenge. If you can participate in an exchange or lease and move as nimbly as the market moves, then you are at a significant advantage to meet some needs with high-quality, proven content that you don’t have to develop at home."

"I think the League has the possibility to move up to scale and get hundreds of schools listed," says Mayadas. "It is exciting. If they can do it, then I think the next group to look at would be the small privates, the not-endowed privates who might be interested in sharing and getting into online learning. As you go higher up within the research ranks of institutions, I think they get picky and are harder to make deals with. So, we may never get there, but we will just keep working our way up."