|
Boston, Mass. - August 13, 2003 - Outside The Classroom today introduced a new version of AlcoholEdu, its best-selling online prevention program, enhanced with new content and engaging, interactive features that provide a transformative learning experience enabling college students to make safer and healthier decisions about whether and how to use alcohol. Improvements to AlcoholEdu were based on the largest evaluative data set in educational programming history - with quantitative and qualitative feedback from more than 50,000 college students. All told, the company's evaluations of AlcoholEdu collected more than 10 million data points about the program.
AlcoholEdu is a customized, two-and-one-half-hour course that students complete in the privacy of their own rooms. It provides updated research- and science-based education in a non-opinionated format, emphasizing the medical and social effects of drinking and the many factors that influence our decisions about whether, when and how much to drink. The course engages students in thinking seriously about the effects of alcohol on their academic performance, health and relationships, empowering them to make better decisions.
"The new and improved AlcoholEdu incorporates the latest science on the effects of alcohol on young people - and especially on their learning, memory and decisions. It is based on a new understanding of how students learn in an interactive, online environment, and on solid research into what motivates them to move through predictable stages of change toward healthier and safer decisions," said Dr. Richard Keeling, Vice President of Prevention Programs for Outside The Classroom. "AlcoholEdu is more interactive, personalized and customized to the individual student's experience than ever before. In fact, students who have tried the new version of AlcoholEdu have told us, 'It's as if the program knows me.'"
Enhancements to the new version of AlcoholEdu were developed by Outside The Classroom's world-class prevention team and are based on formal course evaluations as well as evidence-based strategies in alcohol prevention. AlcoholEdu takes a highly personalized, decision-driven approach and offers customized interactive features that enable it to fit the needs of the many different students who will use it. By engaging students' interest, it not only leads to behavior change, but also stimulates the follow-up conversations and commitments that will help change the culture of drinking on college campuses.
Colleges will administer the new version of AlcoholEdu to students on more than 300 campuses during the coming school year. New features include:
- Decision-driven content and messages: There is an increased emphasis on how students make decisions about drinking, including discussions of what influences people to drink and interactive exercises providing real-world situations students might confront.
- Customization: Based on information students provide about their sex and drinking patterns (drinker or abstainer), AlcoholEdu adapts itself to their particular profiles, providing dialogue and information appropriate to each individual.
- Interactivity: New interactive exercises, including an improved personal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) calculator, a cost-of-alcohol calculator and scenarios about helping friends in trouble with alcohol, allow students to apply new concepts on a personal level. Other exercises help students recognize blackouts from drinking and stimulate their curiosity about alcohol advertising's effect on individual and group consumption.
- Personalized feedback: Students can keep private journals of personal experiences with alcohol, prompted by what is taught in the program. Students also receive personalized feedback throughout the course and have unlimited access throughout the year to an online portal (the AlcoholEdu Notebook) offering interactive elements of the program (such as the BAC calculator), fact sheets and updated research information.
- Improved user experience: The course has a crisp, new look and feel, providing easier navigation and more user choices (including the selection of a personal online "teaching assistant" who guides the student through the course). The result is a more comfortable, personalized online experience.
- Course conclusion: A few weeks after taking the program, students finish their course experience with a follow-up survey and a brief summary of what they learned. This concluding segment works like a "booster" to help students remember the most important program elements and to reinforce their commitments to healthier and safer decisions.
- Better surveys, tests and reports: Surveys are shorter and easier to fill out. Each institution offering the program can set the Final Exam pass/fail grade at whatever level of difficulty it chooses. In addition, the reports analyzing each institution's AlcoholEdu data have been improved to help institutions better assess their needs in alcohol prevention and more clearly understand the results of the course.
Population-Level Prevention™
"Outside The Classroom is delivering the second generation of AlcoholEdu with everything we have learned from and with our customers about the benefits of comprehensive Population-Level Prevention, where entire groups of users go through the program," said Brandon Busteed, Founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom.
Assessment data from eight colleges that in 2002-2003 required their first-year students to take AlcoholEdu showed a decline of more than 13 percent in alcohol consumption by student drinkers along with a 10 percent increase in students abstaining from alcohol entirely. The data also showed significant improvements in intelligent, protective behaviors, such as student drinkers pacing their drinks at one per hour, and reductions in harmful behaviors, such as "pre-partying" - drinking at home before going out to parties where alcohol is served.
"The new version of AlcoholEdu was designed to provide schools the ability to easily deploy a Population-Level Prevention program to an entire community of users," Busteed said. "AlcoholEdu serves as a highly scalable online prevention 'dose' that can be given to entire populations as a way of preventing and reducing high-risk drinking. By deploying an effective prevention program to an entire social group, the program creates a positive 'viral' and 'interactive' effect at both an individual and group level in ways that reduce consumption and change community norms regarding alcohol."
About AlcoholEdu and Outside The Classroom
Developed by a team of prevention experts, AlcoholEdu bases its educational experience on evidence-based prevention methods and current scientific knowledge. It takes students through a personalized, interactive experience with decision-making exercises that emulate real-life situations they may experience at college. AlcoholEdu is also easy to implement and administer. Because it collects data from pre- and post-assessments, including tests and surveys, as well as from a follow-up survey one month after students take the course, it provides administrators with a wealth of information documenting population-level improvements in attitudes and behavior. As the online cornerstone of a university's comprehensive prevention program, AlcoholEdu supports and integrates with other initiatives ranging from motivational feedback to environmental management to social marketing programs, providing the world's most effective solution to the problem of high-risk drinking.
Outside The Classroom (www.outsidetheclassroom.com) was founded to address critical behavioral health issues. In addition to AlcoholEdu, the company helps universities nationwide gain insight about key campus health trends and environmental policy issues with TheHealthSurvey, a comprehensive, online assessment tool. Outside The Classroom is a partner with many prominent organizations, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).
Return to Press Release Listing
|
