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Online@UCF Receives Inaugural Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education

At a November 6 awards ceremony, held during the annual international conference of the Sloan Consortium in Orlando, the University of Central Florida was presented with the first-ever Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education.

Gomory, who recently retired as chairman of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, initiated the Sloan Foundation’s support of online learning. Over more than a decade, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided $80 million in grants to explore and develop the theory and practice of online education. UCF is a recent recipient of a $650,000 Sloan Foundation grant titled “Targets of Opportunity,” which aims to accelerate the integration of online, regional campus and graduate programs to serve the region.

The Gomory Award for Quality Online Education was presented to UCF in recognition of UCF’s achievement in demonstrating ”in a quantitative manner, a commitment to continuous improvement of the quality of its online learning programs using the Sloan-C ‘Pillars’ of access, learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, student satisfaction and faculty satisfaction.” The Gomory Award is based upon the innovative nature of the quantitative metrics used to assess quality, as well as the demonstration of continuous quality improvement based upon those metrics.

This award recognized the culture of evidence UCF has developed to guide and sustain the Online@UCF initiative, as well as the leading research and assessment work done by Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskal of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE), and the quantitative information management systems developed by the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL).