Welcome to the Sloan-C effective practices site.

View Practices

To help make quality education online part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines, Sloan-C shares effective practices online. You see here the beginning of a site that you can help make more and more useful to the higher education community.

Sloan-C focuses on five pillars of quality in online education: student satisfaction, access, learning effectiveness, faculty satisfaction and institutional cost effectiveness. For each of these areas, pillar editors are collecting practices that are innovative and replicable. To let editors know solutions you are seeking, please send emails to:

You are invited to join in improving practices by sharing what you do best in each of the pillar areas. To add an effective practice in one of the pillar areas, please post a brief summary that will be useful to other practitioners. When you have read about the pillars and are ready to share your effective practices, please summarize your program's practices in terms that can be adopted by other providers.

• Create a title that summarizes the content at a glance;
• Include empirical evidence about the efficacy of the practice;
• Note how the practice you post for one pillar may relates to excellence in the other pillars;
• URLs or supporting documents;
• Give a point-of-contact for follow up.

The Sloan Consortium aims to create a set of benchmarks for each pillar so that practitioners will know the effective current practices and incorporate them to meet the goals of the Quality Framework. The discussion and feedback about effective practices will be useful to online educators. In each calendar quarter, a panel of Sloan consultants will select some of the most effective submissions for recognition, and feature the best of the effective practices in press releases.

• Innovation—the practice is inventive or original
• Replicability—the practice can be implemented in a variety of learning environments
• Potential impact—the practice would advance the field if many adopted it
• Supporting documentation—the practice is supported with evidence of effectiveness
• Scope—the practice explains its relationship with other quality elements

Effective practices are automatically eligible for nomination. Each year, Effective Practices Editors select outstanding practices for consideration by an awards selection committee. Selection committee members are unaffiliated with the nominated institutions.