Update: Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments

The Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments (SCALE), detailed in the Summer 1995 issue of Partnerships, received a renewal grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will provide $600,000 over two years to the university-wide program, which supports faculty using Web-based technology for teaching.

SCALE was founded in the spring of 1995 to develop undergraduate Asynchronous Learning Network (ALN) courses to be offered on campus. The original grant and match (by the University) were for a three-year period that concluded at the end of the 1997-1998 academic year.

The renewal grant has 3 objectives: Efficiency Projects, Experiments with ALN, and Institutionalizing SCALE. The Efficiency Projects employ Asynchronous Learning Networks in some of the higher enrollment classes on campus help solve some campus problems including:

relieving excess demand for first-year Spanish courses

decreasing reliance on graduate student teaching assistants in Economics courses, and

targeting students with insufficient preparation in Introductory Physics

The Experiments with ALN are aimed at finding ways to make ALN teaching methods appealing to mainstream faculty. Proposed experiments are intended to determine how best to encourage instructors who are used to teaching in a lecture-based mode to take the first steps towards an assignment-based mode; effectively evaluate student work in small classes without overburdening the instructor; and use class time properly in primarily on-line courses.

One such experiment has been a partnership between SCALE and the Center for Writing Studies. Varkki George, an Associate Professor in Urban Planning and a SCALE faculty fellow in the fall of 1998, served as mentor for several instructors who teach courses which fulfill students’ composition II requirement, but who had not yet adopted technology into their teaching. An interesting finding of this experiment is that while early adopters, such as Prof. George, have little difficulty seeing how to modify their courses to take best advantage of what the technology can offer, other faculty, dedicated instructors in their own right, require a lot of assistance in thinking about how to best re-engineer their courses. Moreover, the type of teaching strategy that emerges from this re-engineering effort is likely to be highly idiosyncratic to the discipline and the instructor's specific goals. Thus, helping these mainstream faculty is likely to require a concerted and sustained mentoring effort by those experienced in the ALN method.

The "Institutionalizing SCALE" thrust includes making the Efficiency Projects permanent fixtures rather than demonstrations and experiments. Evidence of their current success is available in the September issue of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks http://www.aln.org/alnweb/journal/jaln_vol2issue2.htm#arvan. Further institutionalization thrusts include the development of a new Center for Educational Technologies. The Center is intended to ensure long-term campus involvement and is currently in the process of hiring its first director and additional staff.

Lanny Arvan, Associate Professor of Economics, is the Principal Investigator and Director of SCALE. Co-Principal Investigators hail from the Departments of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; Mathematics; Microbiology; Physics; Economics; and Chemistry.

SCALE is nationally recognized as an exemplary on-campus ALN project. Arvan is confident that the Efficiency projects will endure and that SCALE can create measurable social benefit in an on-campus setting, serving as a beacon for that idea. Further information about the Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments can be found at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/.