Five Universities. One Collaborative Archives Education Program.

SAEC began as a pedagogical experiment. Four universities in the Southeastern United States offering archival training came together to address one glaring fact: Archives programs today educate two-thirds of the new archivists in the United States, but most LIS schools do not have the resources to provide the comprehensive program of professional education recommended by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The SAEC partners proposed to combine the specializations and expertise of their faculties with the distance-education delivery enhancement of Internet 2.

Internet 2 allowed teaching faculty at the four schools to share their classes and resources among themselves. It provided an ideal distance education delivery experience, where students interacted with professors and their peers via video conferences in real time.

Classes continue to work like this:

Each conference site, i.e., classroom, has a system of microphones which students activate when they want to speak; otherwise the microphones stay mute. Typically, each classroom has two monitors: one shows the instructor, and the other shows the site that spoke most recently. Activating a microphone signals the video system to switch focus from the previous speaker to the current speaker. Switching takes about 4 seconds.

What distinguishes SAEC from other resource and course sharing enterprises among universities is that SAEC is a pure collaborative. None of the participating universities remunerates the others for classes offered in any way, from faculty salary to technology fees; no contracts are signed that penalize universities for opting out of the collaborative. Only knowledge moves from one campus to another. This “under the radar” arrangement allows faculty a great amount of freedom in offering courses, and gives students the opportunity to study with faculty and students far beyond the geographical and academic limitations of the universities they attend.