When West Virginia Governor Cecil Underwood attended the recent rededication ceremony for a one- room school he attended in Tyler County, he capitalized on the occasion to focus attention upon the Southern Region Education Board's "Electronic Campus," calling the distance learning initiative a "kind of one-room school of the future" for anyone with Internet access.
Underwood, Southern Regional Education Board chairman, noted, "As youngsters growing up in West Virginia, we felt fortunate to have this school and teacher. Now, through the Electronic Campus, people in the most rural areas can have a variety of college courses literally at the doorstep of their homes or offices.
Underwood called the Electronic Campus, "the nation's largest, most successful marketplace of distance learning courses, allowing anyone with a computer to find more than 2000 quality courses offered by colleges and universities in the 16-state Southern Regional Education Board region." Bluefield State College annually offers seven courses through the SREB Electronic Campus.
Recent enhancements to the Electronic Campus include the offering of an "electronic library" for students enrolled in its courses, placing a database of more than 3800 publications at students' fingertips. The newly-established SREB Distance Learning Policy Laboratory will become a focal point for discussing policies, establishing pilot efforts, assessing results, and issuing policy guidelines and recommendations for the Electronic Campus, according to the SREB chair.
Enrollment in the Electronic Campus last year exceeded 20,000 students, with more than 5 million hits recorded on the Electronic Campus web site, "www.srec.sreb.org"
Dr. Tom Blevins, Director of Extended Learning at BSC, added, "The Electronic Campus is designed to assist time-bound and/or place-bound students as they pursue a degree." The BSC course offerings are included in the SREB's website, as well as "Barron's Guide to Distance Learning," a comprehensive, nationally distributed publication to provide information to individuals interested in bringing the classroom into their homes instead of traveling from their homes to the classroom.
Additional information may be obtained by contacting Dr. Blevins at (304) 327-4059.
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