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Boston, Mass. - June 23, 2003 - Outside The Classroom today announced it will make AlcoholEdu, its best-selling college-level online prevention program, available for high schools in the fall of 2003. The new AlcoholEdu College-Bound Program will enable high schools to attack the problem of student drinking with an intensive, Web-based interactive learning program that more than 50,000 college students have already experienced nationwide. It is the first step in providing a comprehensive online prevention program for youth, encompassing high school students, new drivers and youth alcohol offenders. The next step in this initiative will be a newly developed program, AlcoholEdu for Youth, that Outside The Classroom will offer in partnership with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 2004.
"For many students, high-risk drinking starts in high school, and it's important to attack the problem at its source with the right kind of prevention programs," said Brandon Busteed, Chief Executive Officer of Outside The Classroom. "AlcoholEdu is an online experience that helps students learn to make better decisions and in the process change the way they think and behave. When high schools put their entire junior and senior classes through AlcoholEdu, they will preempt many of the costly - and sometimes life-threatening - problems that can arise when young people choose to drink."
AlcoholEdu is an interactive, two-and-one-half-hour program that takes students through a personalized experience with decision-making exercises that emulate real-life situations they may experience at college. Presenting research- and science-based information in a non-opinionated format about the medical and social effects of drinking, it empowers students to make more informed decisions.
Because it is a Web-based program, AlcoholEdu is extremely easy to deploy to an entire student population. High schools purchasing the program are given access codes for all students assigned to take AlcoholEdu. Outside The Classroom hosts and administers the program, monitoring usage and reporting back to the schools on the number of students who have completed and passed the program's final exam.
Drinking by high-school students has long been a concern of secondary school administrators. And at the college level, the problem of binge drinking has reached crisis proportions. In "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges," the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) notes the staggering toll alcohol takes. The survey cites 1,400 alcohol-related deaths, 500,000 alcohol-related injuries, 70,000 alcohol-related sexual assaults, 2.1 million incidences of drunk driving, and 159,000 first-year student dropouts due to alcohol and drugs every year.
Outside The Classroom developed AlcoholEdu to attack the epidemic of high-risk drinking by using a rich online experience to help change student behavior. Assessments of more than 3,000 students at eight colleges requiring their first-year students to take AlcoholEdu in 2002 revealed that, after taking the course, the proportion of students abstaining from alcohol increased and, among students who continued to drink, average consumption of alcohol declined.
Gloucester High School in Massachusetts piloted AlcoholEdu during the 2002-2003 school year with more than 100 upper class students under a grant from the Entrepreneurs Foundation of New England. "AlcoholEdu was very well done. It couldn't help but appeal to most kids," said Sue Ingram, a Gloucester High School health teacher who assigned it as homework. "Students said it wasn't lecturing or moral. It was presented in a simple fashion, sometimes interactive with a little reading, a little listening, so it tapped into all kinds of learning modes."
According to Busteed, AlcoholEdu leverages the online, interactive medium to enable true Population-Level Prevention™ that can change behavior of both the individual and the group. "AlcoholEdu is the most powerful new weapon high schools have in their effort to attack the problem not only at the individual student level, but also at the population level of their institutions," Busteed said.
Outside The Classroom (www.outsidetheclassroom.com) was founded to address critical behavioral health issues. In addition to AlcoholEdu, universities nationwide are gaining insight about key campus health trends and environmental policy issues with TheHealthSurvey, a comprehensive, online assessment tool. Outside The Classroom is a partner to many prominent organizations, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).
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