Five Universities. One Collaborative Archival Education Program.

The AEC started as the SAEC, a pedagogical experiment. Four universities in the Southeastern United States offering archival training came together to address one glaring fact: Schools of library and information science (LIS) 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 partner schools proposed to combine the specializations and expertise of their faculties through distance-education delivered by video conference transmitted over Internet 2.

By the fall of 2009, two schools in the midwest had replaced two southeastern school which had dropped out the collaborative. Keeping Southeastern in the name seemed misleading. However, only the name has changed.

Internet 2 still allows teaching faculty at the partner schools to share their classes and resources. It provides an ideal distance education delivery experience, allowing students to interact with professors and their peers 'live' and in real time.

Classes 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 AEC from other resource and course sharing enterprises among universities is that AEC 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.