News / WISE Honored for Excellence

The Web-Based Information Science Education (WISE) Consortium Honored for Excellence in Online Teaching and Learning. The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), an association of more than 1,000 institutions and organizations of higher education engaged in online learning, has named the WISE consortium a winner of its 2006 Effective Practice Award. WISE offers unique distance education courses to students at its 13 member (of which Pitt is a member) schools. Pitt students have the ability to select from an extensive list of online courses from other ALA-accredited programs, and take courses with faculty who are highly regarded in their area of expertise.

Online learning has greatly progressed since 1992 when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation began giving grants to institutions for online learning initiatives. “The field of online education continues to show vigor and strength,” says Frank Mayadas, president of Sloan-C. “Every year we see advances in the important matters of quality, scale, and breadth within this still fledgling community. The individuals and institutions honored this year are recognized for showing exceptional leadership in advancing online education along these dimensions.”

SIS is proud to be a part of the WISE Consortium, which has offered more than 117 online courses since its founding in 2004.  Recently, the IMLS Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a grant for $936,000 to the WISE consortium to support WISE+ Leveraging the Power of the Network to Increase the Diversity of LIS Curriculum.