SREB Wins National Honor for Post-Hurricane Online Courses

SREB received the 2006 Irving-Barrier Buster Award along with its partners on the “Sloan Semester,” a project that provided online courses for college students in hurricane-damaged areas. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Sloan Consortium partnered with SREB on the project and also won the award.

The Sloan Semester used SREB's Electronic Campus to make online courses and services available for free to students from colleges and universities along the Gulf Coast. The project made available more than 1,350 courses from 155 institutions in 38 states, including 15 SREB states. Classes were offered in a condensed academic term from mid-October 2005 to early January 2006. The program was designed as an academic bridge to help students earn credit and return to their home institutions in spring 2006. More than 1,750 students enrolled in the free online courses, filling over 3,000 “seats” in undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Students had online access to academic counselors, financial aid and admissions through the SREB Electronic Campus, which provides access to thousands of online courses offered by colleges and universities in the 16 SREB member states. (Visit ElectronicCampus.org.)

The Irving-Barrier Buster Award focused this year on post-hurricane assistance and is given by the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC), a nonprofit, distance education consortium composed of about 65 state universities and land-grant colleges. The consortium was developed to promote the creation and provision of high-quality, economical distance- education programs and services to diverse audiences by land-grant colleges and universities.

The award is a combination of two awards traditionally given by ADEC, the Irving Award and the Barrier Buster Award. The Irving Award was named for Irvin Omtvedt, who helped pioneer distance learning and was the first chairman of the board of directors of the Agricultural Satellite Corporation, or Ag*SAT, the predecessor to ADEC. The Barrier Buster Award is given in memory of Bill Murphy, a scholar who was active in community and rural economic development in the early days of what became ADEC.

The Chronicle of Higher Education also was honored with the Irving-Barrier Buster Award for its coverage of the storms' impact on colleges and students.

Bruce N. Chaloux, the director of SREB's Electronic Campus (ElectronicCampus.org), the SREB Distance Learning Laboratory, the SREB Adult Learning Campaign and SREB's teacher Web site TheTeacherCenter.org, accepted the award during an ADEC conference on May 2 in Washington, D.C.