CEO defends alcohol education program
By Meghan Montgomery
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
May 5, 2008
Negative feedback from Ohio University students concerning the overall ineffectiveness of the Alcohol.EDU program encouraged Brandon Busteed, CEO of Outside the Classroom/ Alchohol.EDU, to fly into Athens and gather feedback from OU’s Student Senate last Wednesday night.
Alcohol.EDU is a required online tutorial for incoming students ast OU.
“I’m here to ask for feedback, and I’ve been on campus all day,” said Busteed. “I wanted to ask what we could do to make this program more meaningful to students.”
According to Busteed, a recently published article covered OU students’ disappointment with the overall program. Despite the criticisms, Busteed said he’s convinced the program benefits students.
“There were two independent studies done on this program, and in the study there were interesting findings,” said Busteed. “Research looked at 23,000 students who took the program, and found those who took the program had 55 percent less incidences (for example, ‘black outs’, ‘brown outs,’ unprotected sex).”
According to Busteed, the 50 percent reduction in alcohol consequences suggests the positive impact of taking the program before entering college.
“It’s not about getting students to make big changes… it’s about getting them to make small changes around risk issues,” he said.
Busteed wanted to incorporate Senate’s suggestions and recommendations before the new version of Alchohol.EDU launches in June.
“One of the things we do every year is we develop a new version of the program,” said Busteed. “I wanted a deeper level of feedback this year.”
One criticism of the program has been its failure to relate to students. Student senators cited the unrealistic videos played during the Alchohol.EDU test, and suggested using more student testimonials instead of the fake stories.
“That’s where we are going,” said Busteed. “We’re not doing videos anymore… Students are doing them. You always have that fabricated environment, but the big changes are they are student produced and student led.”
Busteed said he spoke with the Student Affairs staff at OU and President McDavis about this issue. Student Senate’s suggestions on how to improve the program are being taken into account, he said.
“We need to improve satisfaction rates, because that goes hand in hand with education,” said Busteed.
In other business, a second presentation at the Senate meeting addressed the inconvenience of student technology services at the HDL center.
Chief Information Officer Brice Bible of Information Technology explained his plan to relocate certain services into Baker Center’s first floor computer lab.
“This is student-centric,” said Bible. “We want to get all student technology services closer to them.”
According to Bible, the 30 computers in the Baker lab are used half of the time, so splitting the space between a lab and service area for OU’s Information Technology would efficiently utilize the space.
Computer purchasing, computer repair, ID card replacement, and computer kiosks are examples of the services that would be offered in the first floor lab.
Senators voiced concerns about the small size of the lab, and wondered about using open spaces such as the unoccupied Oasis restaurant near Alden Library.
However, Bible said the move to Baker lab would be far less costly than renovating the Oasis.
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