Students

By Caroline Hsu

As Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast in late August, Joseph Sylve, a 20-year-old computer science major at the University of New Orleans, joined 13,000 of his classmates and fled the campus. Now he camps on a friend"s couch in Baton Rouge: The New Orleans house he lived in with his grandparents was at one point submerged under 8 feet of water. Despite all this chaos, Sylve is still taking a full load of classes this fall semester, thanks in part to his school"s online course offerings.

Although Sylve could have simply transferred to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he chose instead to take just six credits in real classrooms at LSU and signed up for nine online credits from the University of New Orleans.

"I know that online classes through UNO would transfer to my major," says Sylve. "Also it gives me more flexibility."

With online courses, he"ll be able to work around his part-time job fixing computers--a job that allows him to pay his tuition.

Educators estimate that 75,000 to 100,000 college and university students were displaced from 13 higher education institutions in New Orleans. An additional 135,000 elementary, middle, and junior high school students were also forced away from their schools. Scattered around the country, some students are opting to sit out the semester, others are enrolling in local public schools and colleges, and yet a third group, including students like Sylve, are turning to distance learning—online classes where students and teachers rarely or never meet face to face.

Distance learning is already widely used at the college and graduate level—it"s a $7 billion industry and growing quickly, according to Eduventures, a Boston-based research firm. Since 2001, the number of students enrolled in online university level courses has tripled to just over 1 million. And the trend is making headway into kindergarten through 12th-grade education as well: School districts are offering online courses to supplement regular school offerings and to reach rural and homebound students.

Critics have long seen online distance learning as an inferior option to brick and mortar class time, or worse, as an easy moneymaker with high potential for fraud. Advocates for online learning say that it"s an underappreciated forum-one whose time has come. The evacuation of students Hurricane Katrina caused is offering an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the pros and cons of E-learning.

"We"ve never seen a situation where so many people are being forced to move and where a consistent education is very difficult," says Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform.

"Virtual schools transcend state and district boundaries. I think the entire situation is going to change people"s viewpoints towards how we educate kids."

Allen sees distance learning as a great untapped resource for displaced primary and secondary school students. "Close to 50 percent of these kids are not in school—some are in a grandmother"s house, and some parents are not willing to send children to an overcrowded or troubled school E-learning programs can offer those students an attractive alternative. For example, Connections Academy, a virtual K-9 public school open to children in 10 states, has enrolled two displaced students living in Colorado. More young students are likely to enroll in other distance-learning programs in the weeks to come.

In the wake of Katrina, 156 colleges and universities quickly signed on with the Sloan Consortium and the Southern Regional Education Board to offer their entire online course catalogs, about 13,000 courses total, free of charge, to displaced students. Companies like Blackboard Inc., which provides Web hosting and easy tools to manage online classes, also volunteered their services. Sloansemester.com will offer an abbreviated eight-week semester beginning October 10 to Katrina-displaced students—some 500 students have enrolled so far in 1,300 courses. Bruce Chaloux at the SREB says that in most cases its program is able to place students in classes that meet the requirements of the school in which they are enrolled—except in rare cases of upper-level undergraduate or graduate classes in areas such as medical billing.

Joseph Savoie, Louisiana commissioner of higher education, says that of 100,000 displaced students, he hopes to have about 8,000 enrolled in online courses by October 10.

"We delayed the beginning of the semester [for online classes] because we knew that with the trauma created by the hurricane, many students would not be able to think about their educations," says Savoie.

Online courses can"t ease all the problems of displaced students, but for many they"ve helped make heading back to class a good deal easier.