Meeting with Boston Consortium

Report on the meeting held at Babson on 10-25-20006.

Kathleen Ives, Janet Moore and I met with Tim Mann (Dean of Students at Babson) and June Kovorikian (emergency continuity planner for the Boston Consortium).

Findings:

1. Babson is deeply interested in academic continuity mainly because 25% of their students are from abroad. Emergencies that threaten people attending will dramatically impact their cash-flow, hence they are invested in figuring out what to do!
2. The Boston Consortium has a large robust planning activity for business continuity, but hasn't done much on academic continuity.

Outcomes:

Susan Kovorkian will query all the Boston Consortium schools about what they are doing about academic continuity and get back to us this week. She will also find any business continuity plans and discuss with her group their level of interest in A/C. She suggests that we do a regional conference face-to-face and engage her consortium.

I am still jazzed about the "insurance" idea in which Sloan-C provides insurance for institutions - the insurance would be the compact between institutions to provide courses and instructors in the case of an incident. Shared pooled risk is the idea. Funds would be needed to enable Sloan-C to act as the broker for faculty/and courses. We would do databases, search for opportunity to make matches, etc.

Other news:

Remote-learner says that the www.academiccontinuity.org site will be operational this afternoon.

John Bourne