Four Universities. One Collaborative Archival Education Program.

The Archival Education Collaborative (AEC) started as the Southeastern Archival Education Collaborative (SAEC), a pedagogical experiment. Four universities in the Southeastern United States offering archival education 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, schools in the midwest had replaced southeastern schools which had dropped out the collaborative. Keeping Southeastern in the name seemed misleading, and the name was changed. However, only the name 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 the AEC from other resource and course sharing enterprises among universities is that the 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; only knowledge moves from one campus to another. Thus faculty at each school teaches courses each knows and enjoys most, while their students have the opportunity to study with faculty and students far beyond the geographical and academic limitations of the universities they attend.