The estimated 13,000 Alaskan schoolchildren with speech and other communications difficulties will get better access to treatment thanks to an innovative new partnership between the University of Alaska Anchorage and East Carolina University.

 The new project will make speech/language pathology training available to Alaskans via on-line courses.

Speech/language pathology is the study and treatment of a wide variety of communication disorders, ranging from organic disorders such as stuttering to communication problems derived from brain injuries. It has long been an underserved field in Alaska’s educational and medical community, the shortage of speech/language pathologists exacerbated by the lack of university training programs in speech pathology in Alaska.

 As part of its mandate to identify and help meet Alaska’s needs, UAA’s College of Education worked with the Alaska Department of Education, which agreed to help the college develop and fund a training program aimed at serving Alaska’s young people.

The college had already collaborated with another university on a successful short-term, on-campus project. Since then, the advance of technology brought with it new possibilities relating to distance education, and university officials began considering a longer-term project making use of the new advancements.

UAA officials began studying and evaluating other universities across the U.S. with the idea of creating a partnership to develop a distance learning curriculum in speech/language pathology.

They settled on East Carolina’s School of Allied Health Sciences, which has operated such a program since 1997. Officials from the two schools signed a five-year memorandum of agreement in July. Four students from UAA, along with 10 of their counterparts from ECU, are currently enrolled in the on-line courses.

UAA is also supporting internships and working with the Anchorage School District to place interns and recruit adjunct faculty for the project. Demand for the classes is high — so high, in fact, that UAA is considering partnering with a second university through distance education.

 “While ECU is accepting a significant number of students, we need an additional university program to meet all the demands,” said Carolyn Coe, a visiting assistant professor in the College of Education at UAA who is coordinating the program in Anchorage.

Dr. Jeff Bailey, chairman of UAA’s Special Education Department, said he expects the program to continue past the five years for which the partnership currently provides.

 “The beauty of this program is that it allows Alaskans who are interested in speech/language pathology training—including those in rural locations—to get it without leaving the state,” he said.

“There’s a huge level of interest and demand out there.”