Always appreciated for their flexibility, online classes now do so much more: provide opportunities for victims of Hurricane Rita.

Months later, people everywhere are still feeling the fallout of the hurricane, even in the classroom.

All Headline News reports:

A new trend in academic education is online courses. These courses, taken by college students seeking freedom and flexibility, now prove a lifesaver for students in the battered gulf coast.

Thirty-one-year-old Polita Ebanks was taking her final semester of nursing pre-requisite courses at Nunez Community College when she fled Hurricane Katrina with her husband and three children. Though her family safely evacuated, her home was destroyed.

"At first I thought my plans, my hopes and my dreams were gone," said Ebanks. "But a wonderful family from a local church here in Memphis, where we have been living since evacuating, gave me a computer and I just took my first quiz online."

Several of my colleagues have this article taped to their office walls. Technology doesn't just offer oohs and ahs: it offers hope.

Posted by Rhys Alexander