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Sep 21, 2005

DePaul University Offering Free Online Courses for Students Displaced by Hurricane Katrina

Classes Offered Through Accelerated Sloan Semester Program

DePaul University has joined with a national consortium of colleges and universities to assist students displaced by Hurricane Katrina by offering free, online courses to those students affected by the storm.

The courses, offered through the Sloan Consortium's "Sloan Semester" program, will afford students impacted by the disaster an opportunity to receive quality online education, tuition-free. This is particularly important for those students who were not able to recover in time to register for on-campus programs this quarter at other universities and for those students who need to study online while they help in rebuilding their family’s lives in storm-ravaged areas.

DePaul will offer 10 courses through its School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems as well as its School for New Learning, including courses in Java programming, database technologies, visual technology, applied networks and security, computer productivity, economics, business ethics and art and architecture.

The Sloan Semester program is a collaboration of more than 200 institutions of higher education, working in conjunction with the Southern Regional Education Board and funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. More than 1,000 courses are available nationwide through the program, all of which carry degree credit for students displaced by the catastrophe.

The special, accelerated eight-week quarter begins Oct. 10. For more information to register for the online courses at DePaul, please visit: http://www.cs.depaul.edu/news/sloan.asp.

For more information on the Sloan Consortium, its membership or the Sloan Semester program, please visit: http://www.sloan-c.org.

To date, more than 75 students displaced from Gulf Coast universities have temporarily relocated and enrolled in on-campus programs at DePaul to continue their studies until their respective campuses rebuild and re-open. The university has fielded inquiries from more than 300 students from the storm-damaged region, and has offered admission to approximately 150 of them.