This article appeared in the Denver Post, October 2005. Storm victims crack books online After Teairra Turner spent two weeks dodging Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, then returned to find her ceiling caved in, she figured she'd have to postpone her degree. Then a cousin suggested she take classes online. Now Turner, 24, is one of hundreds of students enrolled in virtual college with free tuition after Katrina and Hurricane Rita flooded campuses in southern Louisiana. The storms scattered students across the country, but those who couldn't afford to relocate or didn't want to leave their families after the disasters turned to the Internet. Turner was three weeks into her nursing classes at William Carey College in New Orleans when the campus shut down and her family fled to Texas. "I have to count it as a blessing that I get to take these classes and I'm not just sitting out for a semester," said Turner, who lives with her parents in the New Orleans suburb of Boutte. "There's no sense in crying over spilled milk when there is nothing you can do but move on." Turner is taking anatomy and physiology from Community College of Denver and nutrition from Ozarks Technical Community College in Missouri. Almost 1,500 students - including Turner - are enrolled in Sloan Semester, an eight-week online college set up the day after the New Orleans levies broke. Students in the hurricane region don't have to pay tuition and can choose from hundreds of courses offered by about 150 colleges, including CCD, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and Jones International University, a completely online school in Denver. "We wanted to provide them a bridge that would take them from here to January," said Burks Oakley II, one of the coordinators of the special semester and director of the University of Illinois Online. An unknown number of students affected by the hurricanes are taking online courses directly through other universities. Johns Hopkins University's school of public health, for example, has a handful of Tulane students studying online. Regis University in Denver has 24 online students from its Jesuit sister university Loyola New Orleans. A $1.1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City funds stipends for colleges participating in the accelerated Sloan Semester. Still, faculty and staff are putting in extra work without pay. Community College of Denver is teaching 117 students whose college plans were derailed by the hurricanes, including 30 in microbiology and 25 in anatomy and physiology, said Jeanne Stroh, director of online learning. The goal is to help students stay in school. "We know that students who drop out tend not to come back," Stroh said. "We put a lot of value on contributing to community, and our vision of community has expanded through online learning." CU-Colorado Springs is teaching calculus to 15 hurricane-area students. "It's not optimal to take calculus in eight weeks," said Gene Abrams, coordinator for the university's math online program. "But it allows students that think they are able to do this and have the motivation to do this to not miss a semester of college." CU-Colorado Springs instructor Shannon Michaux doesn't use chalk or a marker in her calculus class. She writes on a graphics tablet, which feeds to a computer and reaches the screens of students sitting at home, maybe in their pajamas. The lesson is recorded. Students in the hurricane region, whose classes run on a different schedule, will hear it later. Jones International University, the first fully accredited online university in the country, has 15 students affected by Katrina and Rita, admissions counselor Anna Kautzman said. One student is in the National Guard and had to drop out of college for duty in Louisiana. Carmelite Lofton, a single mother who left her house, job and Southern University at New Orleans, managed to hang on to her college plans in her new home in Atlanta. The 39-year-old, who evacuated with a change of clothes and her college books, is taking a Jones business class and three other online courses. "I thought that I had finally gotten so close to finishing," she said. "As soon as I had access to the Internet, that was one of the first things that I looked into, because that was really important to me." Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com. |