Tuesday, October 28, 2003

By: Kenneth Luck, PR Intern

WILMINGTON, NC - Jimmy Reeves, associate professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Doris Kimbrough, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado at Denver, will be presented the award for ACCESS from the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), an association of more than 450 institutions and organizations of higher education engaged in online learning, for their development of home-based science laboratories. Their work has enabled students to complete lab-based science courses online. The award will be presented at the ninth Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Fla., Nov. 15.

The Sloan Consortium is a nationally recognized organization that supports and evaluates alternatives to traditional educational models. The award recognizes UNCW’s work as “an important model that addresses a need in online learning, and one that could be widely replicated to provide greater access,” according to Reeves. Since the work was done at UNCW and was supported in part by the provost’s office and ITSD, the award also represents recognition of UNCW’s efforts to support distance education. The university intends to advertise the model for other distance learning general chemistry courses, including ones offered to high schools.

The purpose of Sloan-C is to help improve quality, scale and breadth of online learning to make education part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. Created with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Sloan-C membership is open to academic institutions, government and corporate agencies, and organizations that support quality in higher education.

For more information, visit www.sloan-c.org or contact Jimmy Reeves in the UNCW Department of Chemistry at 910/962-3456.

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