When Owen Anderson starts his freshman year at Georgia College & State University on Wednesday, he said only one factor will determine whether he decides to drink: himself.

Wilson was in the middle of taking AlcoholEdu, an online alcohol education course that Georgia College requires freshmen to take before moving on campus. This is the first year Georgia College has required such a program.

Administrators hope the course will influence students and their decisions about alcohol and drinking. Although Anderson said the course has been informative, it won’t lead him directly to abstinence.

“I don’t think it’s going to affect whether I choose to drink or not. That’s going to be my choice,” Anderson said. “It might make me think about it more, but ultimately, it’s my choice.”

The University of Georgia also is requiring freshmen to take a similar online alcohol education course for the first time this year.

For years, colleges have educated their students about alcohol through poster campaigns, seminars and skits. Some have changed their policies and others have worked with the community to reduce high-risk student drinking. Online alcohol education is just one of the newest ways to educate students.

“That course is something that has become very popular in higher education,” Bruce Harshbarger, vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Georgia College, said of AlcoholEdu, which is produced by Outside The Classroom. “I think all over the country, people are feeling that alcohol and the potential for underage misuse of alcohol is a serious concern.”

Underage students generally drink less frequently than their of-age peers but are more likely to binge when they do, according to the 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study. Binge drinking is defined as four or more drinks in one sitting for a woman and five or more for a man.

According to the study, 58 percent of underage men reported binge drinking, as opposed to 42 percent of their legal peers. Thirty-two percent of underage women binge drink, opposed to 21 percent of their of-age peers.

In addition, there is a growing sentiment among college administrators that students are engaging in dangerous behaviors while drinking.

In January, Lewis Fish, a University of Georgia freshman, died of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine and heroin.

Three students - two at UGA and one at Georgia College & State University - have been arrested on alcohol- or drug-related charges in connection with the death, according to The Associated Press.

Two other UGA students who partied with Fish the night he died have entered a pre-trial agreement on underage drinking charges, according to the AP.

Harshbarger said AlcoholEdu was cost effective, as well as being an effective education tool.

“It’s considerably less than hiring a person to go around and do seminars and workshops,” he said.

The cost of AlcoholEdu is based on freshman enrollment. Georgia College is paying $12,000 per year for the course, a little more than $10 per student, Harshbarger said. The university has a four-year contract with the program, he said.

MIXED REVIEWS

AlcoholEdu’s college program is used by about 500 schools, said Erika Tower, director of marketing and communications for Outside The Classroom.

In the beginning of the course, students take a survey regarding their own drinking habits. From there, they are given content based on their answers, such as whether they drink or if they are male or female.

Individual answers are not reported to the schools, so students need not worry about their drinking habits being reported to administrators.

The course, which may take two to three hours to complete, is divided up into chapters that discuss topics such as who influences students’ decisions and the effect of alcohol on the body.

Videos and case studies help illustrate the points. Students cannot skip around in the program, but they do not have to complete the whole course in one sitting.

Patrick Putkowski, a rising freshman at Georgia College, said he was not impressed with the program.

“It kind of feels like it’s just a repeat of things you’ve been told since you’ve been a young kid,” he said.

Putkowski, who said he scored an 85 percent on the test - “I may have missed a couple of the brain questions” - said he didn’t pay much attention to the course, minimizing the screen and checking back after 15 minutes to hit “next.”

“Honestly, it’s just like ‘blah, blah, blah,’ the whole time, and I don’t think anyone who has been in any type of socialized high school will take it seriously,” he said.

Anderson said he found the program informative.

“It has a lot of real good information in it, like things a lot of people probably wouldn’t know,” he said, citing topics such as alcohol’s effect on the brain and state laws on alcohol use.

MyStudentBody.com, UGA’s online program of choice, is a shorter program - it takes about half the time of AlcoholEdu - with the same purpose.

The program, like AlcoholEdu, also personalizes content for students, and consists of students going through sections such as “Alcohol and the brain,” “Alcohol the basics” and “Booze Blues.”

Freshmen and transfer students under the age of 24 won’t be able to register for the spring semester until they complete the program, said Tom Burke, associate vice president for student affairs at UGA.

The program addresses non-drinkers, as well as drinkers, and how they might be affected by others’ behavior, he said.

“We think it’s important that everybody take it whether they drink or not,” he said.

The online course is just one of the university’s “multitude of efforts” to address alcohol abuse and underage drinking, Burke said.

“It’s not intended to be a solution,” he said.

Because of the size of UGA’s freshmen class, which usually is more than 5,000 students, MyStudentBody.com was a cheaper option, costing the university about $9,000 as opposed to $42,000 for AlcoholEdu, Burke said.

Pricing for MyStudentBody.com, which is used by more than 100 schools, is based on total enrollment, said Sarah Lord, director of college health programs at MyStudentBody.com.

ONLINE EFFECTIVENESS

The companies that produce online alcohol education programs tout the ability to change students’ drinking behavior.

An independent study by the Prevention Research Center, which is part of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, Calif., found similar results.

“Those kinds of programs seem to be effective, especially for students with a history of heavy drinking,” said M.J. Paschall, the study’s author.

The study examined the effectiveness of CollegeAlc, an online alcohol education course developed by Prevention Strategies that is similar to AlcoholEdu, he said.

Freshmen at a university in California were randomly assigned to take the course or be in a control group, Paschall said. Then, they were followed through the semester to see if the course had any effect on their drinking, he said.

Paschall said students who were drinkers before college reduced their drinking after taking the online class.

There was no effect on non-drinkers, but that makes sense, Paschall said.

“If you’re a non-drinker, you can’t get much lower than that,” he said.

There also was evidence that the course increased students’ likelihood to plan ahead and not drink and drive, he said.

He said the next step is to compare the programs’ effectiveness between colleges.

Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health, cautioned about relying solely on education programs - online or not - to correct drinking habits.

“From our studies, we’ve found that education programs by themselves do not reduce student drinking,” he said. “There’s a need to do a variety of things, including enforcement of regulations and drinking laws. Work with the community about the way alcohol is sold and marketed and advertised. Work to decrease the strong ties of college sports and fraternities to drinking. You have to change the whole drinking culture.”

Source: www.macon.com

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 12:44 am and is filed under Education News, Online Education. Tags: College, Education News, Student, Study, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.