QuickWire: Sloan Consortium Picks a New Name

The Sloan Consortium, an influential champion of online learning that grew out of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s early interest in the topic, is changing its name and will now be known as the Online Learning Consortium. In keeping with the times, it announced the change in both a traditional news release and a colorful infographic.

The consortium was founded in 1992 and published the first issue of its Journal of Asynchronous Learning in 1997. It has been a stand-alone membership organization since 2009, when its parent foundation shut down its online-education program after spending some $80-million on various undertakings and playing a leading role in the growth of online courses, particularly under the leadership of A. Frank Mayadas, a program director at the foundation.

The consortium’s infographic notes that 6.7 million students took at least one online course in 2013 and that even students in traditional colleges are “starting to prefer customized, blended-learning experiences.” It also notes that traditional-age students living on campuses now make up only 15 percent of current undergraduates and that online learning is “a necessity” for the rest.