The DataCite MDC Stack

In May, the Make Data Count team announced that we have received additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for work on the Make Data Count (MDC) initiative. This will enable DataCite to do additional work in two important areas:Implement ...

Introduction to the Special Edition of the Review of Black Political Economy on Revisiting the Kerner Commission Report

Revisiting the work of the Kerner Commission after 50 years offers the opportunity to explore two unresolved research and policy issues. First, many of the racial disparities that promoted widespread disorder and violent protests in 1967-1968 remain today. Second, there is the embarrassment of not having any African American researchers on the technical staff examining the causes and consequences of racial disparities in economic outcomes. This special edition of the Review of Black Political Economy ( RBPE), with generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, explores these two themes.

AGU Awarded Grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The 3-year grant will help launch the new AGU Ethics and Equity antiharassment initiative.

SHEFFIELD LECTURE - YALE UNIVERSITY JANUARY 11, 2000 INTERNET LEARNING: IS IT REAL AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR UNIVERSITIES?

My interest in learning over networks dates back to 1989. In 1989 there was no commercial Internet. It was hard to get people interested in learning over networks or to even to understand what learning over networks meant or could mean. Fortunately, in 1992 I was joined at the Sloan Foundation by an extremely able program director, Frank Mayadas. Then we were able to get a real program started.

Asynchronous Learning Networks: A Sloan Foundation Perspective

This paper is based on a chapter in THE LEARNING REVOLUTION, the challenge of Information Technology in Academia (Diana G.Oblinger and Sean C. Rush, eds.), to be published this year by Anker Publishing Co., Boston, Mass.Over the years small numbers of motivated individuals have studied by themselves, away from university centers, to acquire knowledge in post-secondary subjects. Correspondence study began over a century ago and since then, other forms of "distance education" have become established. In spite of all this progress, off-campus learners have worked mainly in isolation, with only occasional contact with instructors and peers.Today’s low-cost communications and computer technologies, however, enable learning in Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALNs), in the process simultaneously overcoming barriers of isolation, distance and those imposed by rigid time constraints. The paper describes some projects at institutions of higher education funded by the Sloan Foundation, identifies some early results and possible evolution of ALN’s to large scale implementations.

BLENDED LEARNING AND LOCALNESS: THE MEANS AND THE END

Blended learning can be seen as the means to achieving a greater sense of “localness” on the part of colleges and universities. Blended learning has been evolving for several years and while definitions vary from one institution to another, it is defined in this paper essentially as a combination of face-to-face and online learning. Localness is a term used at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of a new funding initiative to support academic programs designed to strengthen a college or university connection to its core constituencies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship of blended learning and “localness”.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON ONLINE LEARNING IN K–12 SCHOOLS AND TEACHER EDUCATION

In 2006–2007, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded a grant to the Sloan Consortium and Hunter College to conduct a survey of online learning in K–12 schools. For more than a decade, the Foundation had been most generous in awarding grants for online learning that focused on higher education, however, this was the first award directed specifically to the K–12 environments. The timing of this grant coincided with the growing perception of the importance and use of online learning in K–12 schools. During the past several years, the editors of JALN also noticed an increase in article submissions related to teacher education. As a result, a decision was made to publish a special edition of JALN focusing on online learning in K–12 schools and teacher education.

Network analysis to evaluate the impact of research funding on research community consolidation

In 2004, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched a new program focused on incubating a new field, “Microbiology of the Built Environment” (MoBE). By the end of 2017, the program had supported the publication of hundreds of scholarly works, but it was unclear to what extent it had stimulated the development of a new research community. We identified 307 works funded by the MoBE program, as well as a comparison set of 698 authors who published in the same journals during the same period of time but were not part of the Sloan Foundation-funded collaboration. Our analysis of collaboration networks for both groups of authors suggests that the Sloan Foundation’s program resulted in a more consolidated community of researchers, specifically in terms of number of components, diameter, density, and transitivity of the coauthor networks. In addition to highlighting the success of this particular program, our method could be applied to other fields to examine the impact of funding programs and other large-scale initiatives on the formation of research communities.