Dear Commons Community,

I arrived yesterday in Orlando for the 16th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning. (see http://sloanconsortium.org/aln).  I am happy to see that a number of colleagues from CUNY are here and making presentations.  The major speakers are Peter Smith (Kaplan Higher Education), Barbara Means (SRI International) and Julie Young (Florida Virtual High School).   Peter Smith will discuss new ecologies of learning to support “Colleges of the 21st Century.”   Barbara Means will discuss findings from the recent meta-analysis she directed and describe the design principles for online learning that can be derived from it.   Julie Young, President of Florida Virtual School will describe what has made her institution so successful.  All in all, it should be a pretty good program. I will keep the Commons Community posted.

Tony