Today, APUS will be awarded the 2009 Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education at the Sloan Consortium’s International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Florida.  The Sloan Consortium is a membership organization of approximately 1800 higher education institutions, dedicated to improving online learning.  The Gomory Award has been given annually since 2002 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.”  Prior to 2002, the award was given but not named in honor of Dr. Gomory.  Though schools could nominate a single degree program, a cluster of programs within a specific department or school, or the online degree offerings of the institution as a whole, APUS decided to nominate itself using the third criteria listed above.

The Ralph E. Gomory Award is named for Dr. Ralph E. Gomory, President Emeritus of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Dr. Gomory has had an illustrious career that includes Chairman of IBM Research’s Mathematical Sciences Department from 1965-67 and eventually IBM’s Senior Vice President for Science and Technology, the position from which he retired from IBM in 1989.  After his tenure at IBM, Dr. Gomory became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation where he became a pioneer in the field of online education.  Dr. Gomory has served as a Trustee of Hampshire College (1977-1986) and of Princeton University (1985-1989).  He served as a board member of the Washington Post Company.  He also served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from 1984 until 1992.  In 2007, after nearly two decades as President of the Sloan Foundation, Dr. Gomory became President Emeritus and continues to play an integral role in the development and improvement of online learning programs.

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The first personal computer (PC) that I used was an Apple II, circa 1977.  I read about it in an article in Fortune magazine and visited my local ComputerLand store to purchase it.  Early adopters of Apple machines had to be comfortable plugging in circuit boards and controllers and handling floppy drives, monitors and other miscellaneous components of the early personal computers.  I talked my boss at Pricewaterhouse into buying an Apple III (a more powerful machine) for our office in 1979 and we found that we had to classify it as a word processor (remember those?) instead of a computer since individual offices were not allowed to purchase computers.  In 1981, IBM released its personal computer which operated under the Microsoft DOS operating system and the era of personal computing exploded.

Because the companies I worked for standardized on the MS-DOS/Windows platforms initiated by IBM, I didn’t go back to Apple for years.  Around 1997, my wife and I purchased the first iMac for home use.  Alas, the product didn’t meet our needs for power surfing on the internet, so we gifted it to a local school and purchased another Windows compatible machine for home use.

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