Dear Sloan-C Community,
As you may have heard, Sloan-C is working with the Southern Regional Education
Board (SREB) and the Sloan Foundation on a project called the "Sloan Semester"
(http://www.sloansemester.org/) to
bring free online courses to students displaced from colleges shut down due
to damage from Hurricane Katrina. We have been putting together a website
(http://www.sloansemester.org/) that
provides and collects information that will help in this effort and we are now
asking for your help in getting this information out to students that could
potentially benefit from this initiative.
The Boston Globe estimated that as many as 175,000 students will be displaced
this semester due to this disaster. Many will have to seek classes at other
institutions, even now that the semester has already started at most of these
colleges. Sloan-C has organized more than 100 institutions that offer quality
online courses in an accelerated format, starting in October (we are still accepting
additional volunteer institutions at the website).
This is a grassroots effort, meaning everything hinges on your help to get
this information to the students.The press has already given us some coverage,
but that can only do so much, it is really up to our personal efforts to get
the word out. Please contact as many personal and professional contacts
as possible with the hope that the more people you contact, the more likely
more students will find out that this is available. Even if you don’t know
a student from the affected schools, someone you know might, so please forward
to all you feel comfortable forwarding to.
Because these courses start in October and are completely online, this gives
these students the flexibility to have some time to get their personal lives
back together, and the geographical freedom to not have to attend a face-to-face
classroom in an institution far from where they intended. This will also
make it easier for them to return to their institutions once those colleges
have recovered from the hurricane damage.
Please help us in getting the word out to everyone you know, so that we can
help these students continue their academic careers in spite of this very unfortunate
event. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of those affected.
This is the link that you can forward: www.sloansemester.org
Sincerely,
Keith Bourne
Sloan Consortium
Chief Operations Officer
