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After the storm, in a determined effort to accommodate students and faculty who were indefinitely displaced, Dr. Johnson instructed the e-learning coordinator, Ed McGee, to offer as many on-line courses as possible.
Since Delgado email was not functional, McGee created a Yahoo group, linked it to the LCTCS website, and posted an appeal for faculty volunteers. Additionally, Debbie Lea, Director of Curriculum and Program Development, worked closely with the academic deans to identify faculty who were capable of teaching on-line courses. According to McGee, several faculty members, many of whom hadn’t taught on-line before, answered the call, and in Ed’s words, “stepped out of their comfort zone and were real heroes.”
Himself an evacuee who had found temporary shelter with family in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, Ed offered three formal on-site Blackboard training sessions in a Baton Rouge facility secured by CATT Director Frank Smith. McGee and Smith were also available for one-on-one tutorials while Patrick Conroy, Blackboard Workshop Facilitator, offered training in his own home in New Orleans even as he was gutting, cleaning debris and fighting mold. On-line tutorials developed by Ed and Pat were posted to Pat’s site for those who couldn’t make it to the training sessions.
Once compiled, a list of courses and instructors was posted to Pat’s website. These credit courses, offered for free to Delgado students, were advertised through the Yahoo group and other local forums such as WDSU, WWL radio stations and NOLA.com. Approximately one month after the storm, students were registering for on-line courses through Pat’s site.
Without access to any of the Student Information System data files, registration proved to be a daunting challenge, but not too daunting for Debbie Lea and her team, Tim Stamm and Sean Martin. Each day, registration forms downloaded from Pat’s website were sent to Debbie’s group who were sharing one computer and a desk in a makeshift office in Baton Rouge. Working into the night for the duration of registration, they would manually alphabetize the forms, identify the students, place them into sections and provide lists of enrolled students to the registrar. Meanwhile, this team was also coordinating and monitoring the Sloan semester, a group of on-line courses offered free of charge by the Sloan Institute to Delgado students as a humanitarian gesture.
Thanks to the determined efforts of the Blackboard support team, the number of on-line courses increased from 67 to 175 during the Fall of 2005. In Sean Martin’s words, “The on-line semester was a wonderful effort that helped a lot of people. It kept our name out there and provided service to students and faculty. We didn’t sit on our hands after the storm, and doing it for free was awesome!” By the way, students may now select from 250 on-line courses. |
