Displaced Katrina College Students Finish Classes Online
When Hurricane Katrina forced junior Special Kirk out of Dillard University last August, he searched for options to finish the semester. “I didn’t want to fall behind,” he says. “I wanted to stay on pace and graduate.”
Special, 28, and his brother Famous, 23, found a solution in the Sloan Semester, an online education experiment that gave more than 1,000 students, 50 percent of them Black, a chance to take classes while they were displaced or homeless.
The Sloan Semester was created three days after the Aug. 29 rupture of the levees in New Orleans. Its organizers, a consortium of 200 colleges that have been experimenting with online learning since 1993, called on members to make more than 1,500 Internet-based classes free to hurricane victims in response to widespread university closings.
They were assisted by the Southern Region Education Board, an interstate compact for education with 16 participating states. The board assists state leaders by directing attention to key education issues, taking surveys and collecting data.
Organizers of the online experiment had been prepared to hold classes online in case of a campuswide shutdown due to an outbreak of disease, such as bird flu, which affected some Chinese institutions in the first few months of 2005.
Instead, the hurricane and flooding that forced thousands of students in the Gulf Coast region out of school for a semester gave online educators a chance to make their idea a reality, learn lessons from the disaster and see the potential for future uses.
