The Sloan Consortium, a leader in the research of trends in online education, is now offering a free condensed version of volume 6 in their Sloan-C series, " Elements of Quality Online Education: Engaging Communities.&lrquo;

The book offers a fascinating peek into the world of online education, and goes further to examine how online education can improve the quality of ' face-to-face' education.

Contents include working to increase online education, examining the business of education, and more.

Online education has become the leading modality for distance education, and academic leadership expects online enrollment to grow as much as 25% per year. Thus, a central challenge to the nation is how to engage communities to make education " an ordinary part of everyday life.&lrquo;

To address this challenge, leading scholars and practitioners from forty colleges, universities and organizations gathered at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's annual invitational summer workshop in September 2004.

Workshop papers collected here in Elements of Quality Online Education: Engaging Communities, volume six in the annual Sloan-C quality series, include provocative responses to these questions: How can online pedagogy improve face-to-face pedagogy? How can asynchronous learning networks engage the core of higher education? How can the two worlds of academia and industry cooperate to contribute to a tenfold increase in online learning in the next ten years? What do we need to learn about the business of education?

It is interesting to note the use of a traditional publishing method: education will never be completely online, but will offer a variety of choice for future students.

Posted by Rhys Alexander