Could not agree more. It is time to make the move for a variety of reasons. The one issue is that it must be more affordable than F2F. This can be done in a number of different ways. Also it must be made self-sustaining. The government cannot fund it forever. Academia must learn to develop alternative revenue streams. The old model is broken and is beyond repair. just like originally education was only for nobility and opened to the masses it now must be made portable and change to adapt to the new paradigm.

I'm sure that Dr. Mayadas is a smart guy who's made many positive contributions to our industry. But I find no references to him as the "Father of Online Learning" before a few months ago. Online learning is the sort of thing that grew organically and which can be attributed in bits and pieces to many people. Do we really have to let the person with the loudest hype machine take all the credit?

Steve Foerster-

Oh, sigh. It is so unfortunate for you to have written what you have, apparently without looking into the contributions to the field that Frank Mayadas made when it seems that you were not even "of age." It is so unfortunate for you to have written that without knowing Frank Mayadas, as those who are the leaders in this field do. Those who lead in this field all know Frank Mayadas as a self-effacing, modest man, who is a visionary giant in both thought and action. Those who lead in this field - the leaders of the largest programs, the leaders of the major associations, all know that Frank Mayadas would never seek personal acclaim, rather he relentlessly seeks quality, scale and breadth in online learning. Those leaders of the successful programs, who were there as the Web emerged, will tell you that online learning did not just spontaneously emerge and merely grow organically to the size and shape in which it is today without a national vision, leadership, and support. More than any other single individual, that vision, leadership and support came from Frank Mayadas.

The term "father" comes from those who were there at the beginning of what has become to be known as online learning. Ask the founders of the programs at the early leaders in such institutions as Penn State, SUNY, CUNY, UCF, UMass, Illinois and the others who were there at the beginning. They will tell you that without the vision, leadership and support of Frank Mayadas, their programs, which are emuulated by many would not exist, or would not have grown to be the leaders that they are now.

You may have heard of the five pillars of online learning which Frank Mayadas penned. Perhaps you have heard of the Sloan Consortium with a thousand members dedicated to quality in online teaching and learning - the consortium which Frank Mayadas founded, presided over until last year, and continues to guide. The USDLA recognized his contributions through awarding him a Medal of Achievement. He has done much to shape and guide the US Army's very large online learning program eARMYU. You may have read articles from the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) - but perhaps that you didn't know that Frank Mayadas coined that term long ago. And, there are so many, many more examples.

The term "father" commonly does not emerge in the first year, or even the first decade of anything as broad and important as online learning. It is something that is considered only over the test of time. As Frank Mayadas approaches retirement this year from the Afred P. Sloan Foundation, many in this field have taken pause to consider the impact of Dr. Mayadas' vision, leadership and actions.

It is not any "hype machine" that is promoting Frank Mayadas as the father of online learning. It is, rather, the individuals at hundreds of institutions who witnessed and benefited from the contributions of this visionary over time who independently and individually say so. Those who recognize Frank Mayadas as the father of online learning are those who were there at the pre-dawn of the Web, working together and apart to provide access to quality education to prospective students at anytime and in anyplace.

Mr. Foerster...

I'll not repeat the excellent points made by Otelius in his exceptional response to your note. Suffice to say you have been taken, appropriately so, to the academic "woodshed" for your remarks. I trust you understand that, although your shallow commentary call that capacity into question.

To be completely transparent, you should know that I have the honor of serving as President of the Sloan Consortium's Board of Directors and have been a colleague of Dr. Mayadas for over 10 years. I'm one of those who has picked up on the press references to him being the "father" of online learning. As Otelius noted, its not one our community made up, rather is one that those who know of his many contributions to online learning have used. We tend to agree--the record is clear that the millions (yes, Mr. Foerster, millions) of dollars of support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to colleges and universities over the past 15 years, spearheaded by Dr. Mayadas, have had a profound impact on higher education. There is an online community of breadth, depth and quality, certainly not attributable to Dr. Mayadas, but we (and you) would not be in the position we are in today without his contributions. Check the facts, sir...

Not once during this time have I ever heard Frank take credit for his efforts, nor anyone at the Foundation for that matter. They simply saw the potential of online learning as a means to a better end, in keeping with the Foundation's 75 year history of making the quality of life in America better. We believe they have succeeded, thankfully to the benefit of hundreds of thousands of students. Maybe we would have gotten to this point without the investments made by the Foundation led by Dr. Mayadas, but certainly not in 15 years. I'm one who believes we would never have gotten there without the "risk capital" that Dr. Mayadas seeded across the higher education landscape.

Let me leave you to ponder this quote from Alfred P. Sloan (you might want to do a little research on Mr. Sloan and the Foundation). This quote from him in 1941 epitomizes the efforts of Frank Mayadas. Mr. Sloan would be proud, as proud as those of us who know, respect and appreciate Dr. Mayadas and his contributions to the field.

"The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit that creates our jobs. There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different."

Bruce Chaloux, Ph.D.
President, The Sloan Consortium

oteluis - Dr. Chaloux
Thank you for such valuable information. It is too often that somebody like Dr. Mayadas is overlooked and criticized. As they say "the true pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their back". It is great when someone who obviously worked very hard at achieving a goal is truly rewarded with praise and recognition. It is a lesson that our student's need to understand in today's society. Hard work and dedication is the route to success. Not hype and criticism. Obviously Dr. Mayadas is due this respect. Thank you again for bringing this to my attention. If there is anyway that I can contact you directly for more information please feel free to email me at patrickaievoli@yahoo.com. I would truly like to know more about Dr. Mayadas and his work.

How interesting. I'd never heard of Dr Mayadas either, and I've been involved in online learning for over ten years, albeit not in the US. I've googled and I can see that he has been a tireless worker, and has no doubt improved that way that learning has been delivered through his work.

However, my work has been in how pedagogy has been changed by the changes in delivery modes in the last decade, while Dr Mayadas seems to have worked more in the area of technical development. I suppose this is why I've never encountered his work before. But I'm afraid that I wouldn't give him, or any other person, the title of 'father' (or 'mother') of online learning. As stevefoerster says, on;pine learning has had organic growth, and has many antecedents. It's present state is due to many influences, of which technical is crucial but the singular.

Sorry - *not* singular!

Hi
I know of the Sloan Foundation, and recognise that it has made an excellent contribution to the growth of online learning. I have been working in the field since 1997, when I first met the creator of WebCT, Murray Goldberg at the University of British Columbia and I have never heard of, or read anything by Dr Mayadas. Titles such as the one given to Dr Mayadas are not particularly useful when the growth of online learning has been a global phenomenon, often driven by the distance learning community which is very well established outside the USA. By all means acknowledge the contribution of Dr Mayadas in the USA, he clearly deserves accolades and acknowledgement for his contributions in the US, but others have done as much or more and are considerably better known throughout the global online teaching and learning community. It would seem from the comments made by Bruce Chaloux that Dr Mayadas is a modest man who may well be embarrassed by the title.

Have to agree with stevefoerster, mhward, and davidmk. I've been working in online learning research and practice since 1997 (and instructional technology in the years since 1975) and have never heard of this guy. He must be a little TOO self-effacing. :-) He also hasn't published a lot. I just did a search of WilsonWeb and he published ONE article on the topic in the past 10 years - in a Sloan publication. The Chronicle should be more careful of accepting such titles without checking the source or the accuracy. Davidmk is also probably correct when he says Mayadas, for all his good contributions, might well embarassed by a title he clearly does not deserve.

Let me simply add my strong personal affirmation of the views of those who would call Frank Mayadas the "Father of Online Education." I served on the Board of the Sloan Foundation during the years when Frank inspired and led the development of what Sloan called "asynchronous learning." From that position I watched his work first hand! He labored not only in the area of "technical development" but provided strong leadership in the crucially important development of the field's institutional infrastructure. And then, of course, there was Sloan's $80 million. That didn't just fall out of a tree.

It is certainly true that any such major development benefits from the work of many contributors. It is also true that some of those contributors can be a little parochial and overimpressed with the importance of their own contributions. If they will just look at the big picture as it has emerged over time, I think they must agree that Frank Mayadas deserves to be called the "Father of Online Education."

This kind of self-adsorbed rhetoric speaks more loudly for itself than anything we can say here. Does it not say something about the depth of Chronicle reporting?

When we (in my former role at the University of Phoenix) began seriously investigating online learning in the early-1980's, we were by no means the first. (IBM, by the way was dead set against online learning unless it imitated, however poorly, the physical classroom.)

I recall getting considerable help from Linda Harasim at Canada's OISHE and from an Australian institute that had been successfully providing asynchronous online in the Outback (dial-up 1,200 BAUD) for several years.

There were may forward-looking players in those halcyon days. We often got credit for turning online learning into a stand-alone enterprise even though we didn't graduate our first fully online cohort until 1989. By the time Sloan or A. Frank Mayadas got involved, we had graduated thousands of students through fully online graduate and undergraduate degrees, as has many other schools.

Robert W Tucker
President & CEO
InterEd, Inc.

FYI

I have also been professionally involved in online/distance learning for 15 years and am aware of the variety of individuals that have been involved in its development and promotion, such as Michael Grahame Moore, Charles Wedemeyer and others who have provided its theoretical underpinnings. Dr. Mayadas has certainly been a familiar name to me for many years and deserves wide praise and accolades for having "put the money where his mouth is". Rather than arguing over whether he is the Father of Online Learning (a title that he would certainly not give himself), we should recognize his substantial contributions and determine whether what he says about increasing the size and scope of online learning has merit. I believe that it does.

Who cares about all this? Everyone is convinced that going online is only a good thing? Sorry. I don't buy it.

"And Mr. Mayadas, considered the Father of Online Learning..." While I am always happy to see another Cornell University Ph.D. in a leadership position, it is an academic tradition to give credit to others whose work created a foundation for one's own. Therefore, I respectfully call attention to two National Science Foundation projects that were large-scale and very successful in online education, namely Plato and TICCIT. http://thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TICCIT Donald Bitzer and Paul Tenczar and M. David Merrill and many others contributed to the success of those early efforts.

I'm confused and seek some clarification. As someone who must use online coursework to complete a degree program I am unclear as to why a university or college charges the same cost per credit hour for F2F as online?

While I don't dismiss the rigors of teaching online or deny that it in many instances may even require additional instructional skills, the expenses required to support such a class must be less. If that is the case, then why am I paying nearly 1,200 for one, online, 3-credit course from a state university while my student peers on campus receive far more benefits i.e. student unions, landscaped grounds, free use of technological resources, a library etc.
Finally, why aren't universities and community colleges seperating those online dollars from traditional tuition to support additional resources to improve online education? (I'm betting that guy isn't getting overtime for working 8 am to midnight)
Again, I'm confused as to the lack of disparity in fees for online vs. F2F and I'm unclear as to why there's not more dollars in the pot for the support of online education.
Afterall, if I'm taking an art class and pay a $50 fee for kiln use I don't expect it to be used by the facilities department for use in landscaping.

pblanken,

Different universities structure their online cost differently. It makes sense that a student who never comes to campus should not need to pay parking, health center, computer lab, student activities and other fees. However, the learning management systems used to deliver online courses may run $100-200K per year in licensing and hosting fees. Institutions like mine pay for 24/7/365 technical support for our online students and we have admissions, registration, financial assistance counseling and student academic support staff dedicated to online students, in addition to instructional designers and instructional technologists to train and support faculty and assist in the development of online courses (for which faculty are paid a stipend in addition to their salaries). When those fees are calculated and compared to the on campus fees that online students do not have to pay--it is just about a "wash". Where online programs often save the most money is by hiring adjunct faculty to teach.

There is something a bit untoward about the comments made in response to stevefoerster (#2), above. A sceptical three sentence post about who might deserve credit for what is followed, in five minutes, by a five paragraph (see #3) response with additional subsequent followups. Didn't someone once say something about protesting too much?

Online education is a great option for many busy people. The problem is that it doesn't truly reflect what goes into going to a college campus. In my opinion, it is much harder to go to school than it is to log onto a computer. Just my opinion.