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 […]