 |
Nanette Vega
Assistant Dean of Students |
In their second-year of implementing AlcoholEdu® for College, the University of Miami is taking a multi-prong approach to its alcohol prevention programming. As the cornerstone to other initiatives, the online program has allowed the university to administer alcohol prevention to all incoming freshmen using a Population-Level Prevention® approach.
"The reason we chose AlcoholEdu for College as the foundation of our alcohol prevention efforts is because we wanted all of our freshmen students to have the same knowledge base before they arrived on campus," said Nanette Vega, Assistant Dean of Students. "Our ultimate goal this year is to educate our students on the dangers of binge drinking and to minimize the number of incidents that we have on campus."
With their largest incoming class to date, the university had tremendous success requiring all students to take the course prior to arriving on campus. Approximately 2400 students logged on with roughly seventy percent of them completing the course by the deadline date. Those students who did not complete the course were blocked from registering for their spring classes until they completed the program.
Complimenting AlcoholEdu for College are a number of prevention initiatives, including IBIS Ride, a student safe-ride program that is one of the most popular and highly utilized programs on campus. The shuttle service operates Thursday through Sunday evenings throughout the school year and provides free rides to and from Coconut Grove hot spots. In the month of September, the program gave over 1300 rides to UM students.
In addition, the university offers peer-educator workshops open to all students, a monthly campaigns series which highlights various health-related topics each month, full participation in Alcohol Awareness Week, Bacchus and Gamma, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on campus.
"We realize that alcohol is a problem on college campuses," Vega adds. "That is why since day one we have sent a clear message to our freshmen as to what types of behavior will and will not be acceptable on campus."
More information on University of Miami is available at its Web site.
Want to make your students more successful by bringing AlcoholEdu to your campus? Click here!
|
