Online Courses Provide Hurricane Relief for Students

by Evelyn Beck

When Burks Oakley logged onto the Web at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 31st, and learned that two levees had collapsed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans underwater, he sprang into action. First he e-mailed his University of Illinois colleague Ray Schroeder, who had been trying to organize a national conference to talk about how college campuses could respond to a major disaster.

“This is exactly what Ray had predicted—that campuses might be shut down by some emergency,” says Oakley, the university’s Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs as well as the director of U of I Online. “But he had thought it might be the flu or SARS or a radioactive spill.”

By 9 a.m. that same day, Oakley had arranged a conference call to discuss what he and his higher education cohorts could do to help. By 11 a.m., he was writing a proposal to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A day and a half later, that proposal received $1.1 million in funding for what became known as the Sloan Semester. By Sunday, content was up on the Web for this accelerated eight-week online semester created exclusively to serve students displaced by the storm. Tuition was free and all college fees were waived, though students did have to buy books.

Ultimately, over 1500 students enrolled in about 800 different courses that ran from October 10 to December 2, 2005. The number of course enrollments totaled about 2,700. Most of the students taking these courses were from New Orleans; some also hailed from Texas and Mississippi.

Additional students affected by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma also signed up, as did some members of the National Guard who had to drop out of traditional classes when they were activated in response to Katrina.

More than 200 institutions volunteered to participate, all of them members of the Sloan Consortium, an international association of colleges and universities committed to excellence in online education. The consortium worked with the Southern Region Education Board, a cooperative effort between educators and legislators that has as its members 16 Southern states, including those in the path of Katrina. Faculty who volunteered to teach these special courses donated their time.

It has been estimated that as many as 175,000 students from 30 schools in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were affected by Hurricane Katrina. Given that estimate, the initiators of the Sloan Semester had expected as many as 10,000 students to register, but that level of interest never materialized, for several reasons. One is that many others in higher education also opened their doors.

“We put this together in two days when the levees really breached, and we had no idea what would happen,” says Oakley. “A number of institutions welcomed students to relocate and enroll late into their classes. There was a great outpouring across the country. We didn’t know that was going to happen.”

Of the affected students, some of those who didn’t enroll in the Sloan Semester are taking online classes directly through other institutions, and many students moved to other campuses, many of which also offered free tuition for displaced students. Still, says Oakley, “it’s gratifying to see the individual students we’ve helped. Every one is a success. This was a good solution for students who didn’t have the means to get to another campus. And it’s a good way to ensure they’re coming back in January to their home institutions.”

One group the Sloan Semester couldn’t assist was faculty who were walloped by the hurricane, an unknown number of them losing not only their paychecks for the fall but in some cases their homes.

“We tried to figure out what programs would help faculty who were impacted, but we couldn’t figure out how to reach them,” says Oakley.

Another kink in the Sloan Semester was the level of duplication in course offerings.

“We had 15 different Comp I courses, so we ended up with two students in each course,” says Oakley. “There was no good solution in how to deal with multiple sections of a course. And there were some courses with no demand.”

Oakley hopes never to see another situation like Hurricane Katrina, but if the worst happens, he has learned some lessons.
“If I had it to do over again, I would have gotten in my car and driven to Houston and Baton Rouge and met with the institutions that were shut down,” he says. “Their phones and e-mail servers were underwater. We really only reached students after we got a message on the Web sites of the impacted institutions that the Sloan Semester was a free alternative to take classes this fall.

The real lesson is that cell phones go down, too. Key individuals at an institution really need to have a satellite phone to stay in contact. It’s an emergency preparedness thing we never would have thought of.”