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Newton, Mass. - November 12, 2003 - Outside The Classroom today introduced AlcoholEdu for Sanctions, a Web-based interactive course designed to prevent future problems among college students who have violated their schools' alcohol policies. Based on the best-selling AlcoholEdu for College program, it is designed specifically to help students understand the factors that led to their violation of alcohol policies and the ways they can avoid a recurrence. By providing a strong educational foundation to support campus judicial programs, AlcoholEdu for Sanctions becomes an essential component of any college's comprehensive alcohol prevention initiative.
"AlcoholEdu for Sanctions is the perfect complement to AlcoholEdu for College, the Population-Level Prevention™ tool that colleges are providing for their entire first-year classes and selected at-risk populations, such as athletes and members of Greek-letter organizations," said Brandon Busteed, Founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom. "While AlcoholEdu for College provides primary prevention for the entire population, AlcoholEdu for Sanctions is the key to secondary prevention - individual interventions with students whose behavior has caused negative consequences for themselves, others or the college."
More than 50,000 students on more than 300 campuses have taken AlcoholEdu for College, making it one of the most popular courses on the Internet.
Five-chapter format
AlcoholEdu for Sanctions is a two-and-one-half-hour interactive experience that engages students with non-opinionated, science-based alcohol prevention education. It provides a highly personalized, customized educational experience that produces strategic learning gains, changes perceptions, motivates behavior change and supports healthier decisions. It includes five chapters covering decision-making about drinking - from the way drinking affects college life to practical scenarios that illustrate the real circumstances in which drinking decisions will have to be made. The chapter contents include:
- Shaping Our Decisions: Helps students recognize the role of drinking in campus culture and the ways that the college environment affects their drinking decisions.
- Just the Facts: Introduces the fundamental facts about how alcohol is produced, the impact of alcohol on the body and health, the factors influencing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels and the effects of various BAC levels on the body and mind.
- Good Times, Bad Times: Investigates alcohol's medical benefits and risks, its effects on social relationships and its impact on risk-taking behaviors and decision-making, including drinking and driving.
- Learning, Memory, and Alcohol: Illustrates how alcohol affects learning and memory, debunks the myths about blackouts, explains the development of the young adult brain, describes alcohol's impact on students' academic performance and explores alcohol's interactions with other drugs.
- Deciding for Yourself: Helps students design their own decision-making strategies, including handling parties, coping with peer pressure, finding a support network and helping others address problems with alcohol.
Special features for college judicial programs
Several important features of AlcoholEdu for Sanctions make it the most effective online tool available to meet the specific alcohol prevention needs of college judicial and disciplinary programs:
- Screening Tool: AlcoholEdu for Sanctions integrates AUDIT (the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test), a tool developed by the World Health Organization, to help students assess their own drinking behavior. Though not a diagnostic intervention, the 10-question test presents automated feedback to students based on their responses, encouraging those with potential problems to seek support through a formal assessment by a trained health professional.
- Personalized Feedback: Based on proven motivational interviewing techniques, AlcoholEdu for Sanctions collects responses from students to questions about their behavior and provides information that helps them evaluate and reflect upon their past drinking choices.
- Personal Journal: Students respond to open-ended questions about the kinds of choices and situations that often result in violations of alcohol policies in a confidential, personal journal. With yearlong access through the AlcoholEdu Notebook portal, they can later review and reflect upon what they have written.
In addition, the course offers the following useful features:
- Pre-, post- and follow-up surveys allow administrators to measure students' alcohol-related perceptions, attitudes and behaviors before, immediately following and several weeks after taking the course.
- Decision-making scenarios and interactive exercises interwoven throughout the course reinforce learning.
- Two tests - the Pre-Test and the Final Exam - provide administrators with an objective measure of students' learning gains.
- The AlcoholEdu Notebook, a personal portal, offers students year-round access to a summary of their own feedback and personal journal entries as well as course tools, like the BAC calculator, fact sheets and cost calculations.
- The Course Conclusion, which is presented to students one month after they complete the Post-Survey, reiterates the major concepts from the course and introduces students to the Follow-up Survey.
AlcoholEdu for Sanctions can be deployed independently but also works well in partnership with AlcoholEdu for College. AlcoholEdu for Sanctions on its own helps colleges reduce short- and long-term consequences and costs of high-risk drinking. And when paired with AlcoholEdu for College, it helps achieve measurable changes in the institution's overall drinking culture.
About AlcoholEdu and Outside The Classroom
AlcoholEdu bases its instruction on interdisciplinary applications of alcohol to brain science, sociology, history and mathematics. 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.
The AlcoholEdu development team is led by Richard P. Keeling, MD, Vice President for Prevention Programs, and includes prevention professionals, assessment and evaluation experts, and leading scientists, including distinguished neuropsychologists and brain researchers Scott Swartzwelder, Ph.D., and Aaron White, Ph.D., of Duke University Medical Center.
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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