On a plane trip in preparation for the July 4th holiday of 2004, I brought along a copy of a recently published research report entitled, “Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to e-learning and Why” (Zemsky and Massy 2004). This well thought out study looked at e-Learning in both the higher education and corporate markets and generally painted a picture of an over-hyped technology that, although not dead, simply has not lived up to promises and is awaiting some future innovations before taking off in a big way.

Having recently departed a position at Collegis, Inc. (http://www.sungardcollegis.com/) where I was responsible for Online and Academic Services to a client base of about 50 higher education institutions, I was certainly very aware of the challenges associated with implementing e-Learning in higher education. The challenges are numerous and I could certainly sympathize with some of the disappointment relayed in the “Thwarted” study. On the other hand, I had personally been involved with many institutions that certainly had achieved success in using the Internet to support instruction. These included statewide consortiums, as well as all types of private and public institutions. Some institutions had turned around key programs that were in decline, others had significantly improved enrollments and revenues.

Some of the institutions I was aware of were clearly embracing the Internet as a fundamental component in a strategy to serve students better, while others were more laissez-faire in their approach. Some seemed to be in a reoccurring debate of “Is this a good thing?” Others seemed to be able to draw that debate to a conclusion and move forward. So, what was really happening in higher education e-Learning? Why did my experiences point to many examples of success while the “Thwarted” report described a “boom going bust”?(Zemsky & Massy, 2004b)

In late 2003, prior to the “Thwarted” report, a report issued by the Sloan Consortium entitled “Sizing the Opportunity” (Allen and Seaman 2003) indicated from a survey of 994 institutions that 66.8% agreed that online education was critical to their long-term strategy while projecting a 19.8% growth rate in online students over the next year. The “Thwarted” study pointed out that the “Sizing” study may have drawn flawed conclusions for at least two reasons. The first was that the study represented a biased sample - those most likely to respond were those that were successful. The second was that the measurement of the number of online enrollments, which was the focus of the “Sizing” study, was not necessarily an accurate indicator successful adoption. This was because much of the adoption to date accorded to the “Thwarted” study was on a very simplistic form of online course (essentially a correspondence course delivered online) that was relatively easy to achieve but not consequential. The study proposed that the real innovation lies ahead in much more sophisticated capabilities, such as the faculty’s ability to build courses from a “learning objects” database.

More recently Sloan has published the next annual update, “Entering the Mainstream” (Allen and Seaman 2004), in which 1,170 institutions participated. The report indicated the annual growth projection of close to 20% had been met. In addition, an increasing growth rate in online students of 24.8% in the next year is expected. Interestingly, the percentage of schools that indicated that online learning is critical to their strategy dropped to 53.6%. The “Entering” report has provided a more complete breakdown by Carnegie classification than its predecessor. This is revealing in that Baccalaureate institutions are clearly a laggard in terms of the importance of online learning to their strategy and non-profit private institutions clearly indicated that online courses were perceived as inferior quality compared to traditionally delivered courses.

The comparison of the findings of the “Thwarted” study with the “Sizing” study, in conjunction with my personal experience working with a range of institutions, indicated that there are differences in how institutions are approaching online learning and how they are perceiving their level of success. From those differences arose the current study that tries to understand why some institutions believe they are succeeding by looking at how they are doing it and identifying common denominators of success. In so doing, we hope to provide higher education leaders and online learning practitioners with information that will help them make the right choices with respect to the use of the Internet to support learning at their institution.