Company Markets an Online Alcohol-Education Course to Colleges

2/20/2001

The Chronicle of Higher Education

By Sarah Carr

Outsourcing is taking a new twist as colleges and universities contemplate paying a company for online courses in health issues.

The company, Outside the Classroom, is currently marketing a course in alcohol awareness.

Officials at Outside the Classroom say that this year they are offering the course to colleges free, although they hope eventually to charge about $15 for each student who takes it.

At Washington and Lee University, the course was offered this fall to members of the university's alcohol task force and to students who had been identified as "high-risk drinkers" in the fraternity system, says Jan Kaufman, the university's health educator.

She plans to start using it for freshman orientation. "We got really good feedback from the different populations that did the program," she says.

The course uses case studies to examine how people decide how much to drink in various party settings. "They have real people, in real scenarios, and ask how you would respond," she said. "When I did it, I purposely made some bad choices, and was really pleased with how they handled that."

Ms. Kaufman says she believes that the impersonal nature of the online medium may be a boon for such a course. "I think students are so used to being on the computer and getting information from the computer," she says. "It is really a method that appeals to students."

Other universities that have tested the course in the past few months include the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Scranton.

The course is broken down into segments that last less than 10 minutes and include interactive exercises. The students learn about how alcohol affects the body and about the social and political issues associated with alcohol consumption. One chart in the first unit shows the varying alcohol contents in different beers. At another point, students can explore how gender and weight impact blood-alcohol levels.

Brandon Busteed, the founder and chief executive officer of Outside the Classroom, says students learn about alcohol "much in the same way that they would learn about chemistry."

Mr. Busteed said he originally hoped to start Outside the Classroom as a nonprofit entity, but was discouraged by the response he received to the idea. "I literally shopped around the model with a number of foundations, all of which told me to keep dreaming," he says.

Even as a commercial enterprise, Outside the Classroom may struggle to remain viable, he concedes. "Because of the low price, if we don't have a lot of schools taking the course, we are obviously going to lose money."