About the Award
The Inaugural Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education was 
presented to the University of Illinois at Springfield on November 6, 2008.
The award was “presented by the Sloan Consortium to an institution that has demonstrated its commitment to assessing and improving the quality of its online education programs through quantitative application of the Sloan-C Quality Pillars. The five interdependent pillars, upon which quality online education is based, are:
- Access
- Learning Effectiveness
- Cost Effectiveness
- Student Satisfaction
- Faculty Satisfaction
The Sloan-C Quality Pillars parallel the familiar principles of continuous quality improvement, in which quantitative metrics are used to improve products and processes” (from Sloan-C).
