College Students Interrupted by Hurricanes Continue Studies Online

ATLANTA, Nov. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Thirty-one-year-old Polita Ebanks was taking her final semester of nursing pre-requisite courses at Nunez Community College when she fled Hurricane Katrina with her husband and three children. Though her family safely evacuated, her home was destroyed and her dreams were shattered. "At first I thought my plans, my hopes and my dreams were gone," said Ebanks. "But a wonderful family from a local church here in Memphis, where we have been living since evacuating, gave me a computer and I just took my first quiz online. Now I see that it's not the end of the world. I am so grateful for the opportunity to regain some sense of normalcy."

For Ms. Ebanks, normalcy came in part by being able to continue her studies online through an innovative program designed as an academic bridge. Sloan Semester allows students impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to continue their studies and return to their home institutions next term. The special 8-week accelerated semester offers a wide range of courses to serve the learning needs of students at the community college, university and graduate level, regardless of academic discipline.

Sloan Semester is now providing more than 1700 college students tuition- free online courses. In all, more than 4000 enrollments have been processed from a catalog of 1322 courses. Sloan Semester is offered by The Sloan Consortium, an international association of colleges and universities committed to quality online education, in collaboration with the Southern Regional Education Board. It is funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"With more than 150 institutions from major research universities to community colleges offering courses, Sloan Semester is demonstrating the quality, scope and breadth of online learning in America," said Frank Mayadas, Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "All courses carry degree credit from regionally accredited institutions, everything from Art History to Biostatistics."

"Sloan Semester allows our students to continue their education while experiencing online courses, many for the first time," said Elizabeth Barron, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Xavier University. "We are very grateful for the support and the opportunity."

The Southern Regional Education Board (http://www.sreb.org/), headquartered in Atlanta, was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislatures to help leaders in education and government work cooperatively to advance education and improve the social and economic life of the region. The SREB has 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Each state is represented by its governor and four gubernatorial appointees.

The Sloan Consortium (http://www.sloan-c.org/) is the nation's largest association of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education and administered through Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and Babson College. Its mission is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.