Gulf Coast students who were not able to enroll in other universities after Hurricane Katrina could get their second chance for a fall semester.

The Penn State World Campus and the Sloan Consortium, an organization that promotes online education, have converged, along with more than 150 other universities, to offer tuition-free online courses to those affected by the hurricane.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit institution, and the Southern Regional Education Board contributed a $1.1 million grant to the Sloan Consortium for tuition-free courses.

Penn State World Campus Senior Director Pete Rubba said that when students sign up for the course Penn State offers, the consortium will make a payment to the university to cover the cost of the course. This will ensure that students affected by Katrina will not have to pay for the courses.

The courses will be offered as an eight-week semester called the "Sloan Semester." Rubba said that after this eight-week period, the classes would end because the colleges and universities that shut down because of the hurricane are expected to reopen in the spring.

National Guard volunteers who were not able to attend college courses because they were helping with the Katrina relief effort will also have a chance to enroll in the online courses, said Burks Oakley, co-chair of the Sloan Semester steering committee.

Oakley said the consortium had been thinking about what would happen if a college or university was forced to shut down, and they had decided that online courses would be the best way to continue education. After seeing what happened in New Orleans, the group began to organize the initiative, he said.

Oakley said about 1,200 courses are being offered from more than 150 universities. He said that more than 2,000 students have expressed interest in taking courses.

Penn State is offering two courses, Energy and Geo-Environmental Engineering 101 (Energy and Environment) and Information Sciences and Technology 110 (Information, People and Technology) as part of the program.

Jonathan Mathews, assistant energy and geo-environmental engineering professor, and Cole Camplese, director of the Information Sciences and Technology (IST) Solutions Institute, have volunteered to teach the courses.

The consortium encourages the universities to give a stipend to the professors who volunteered, Oakley said.

Camplese said he read about the Sloan Consortium's initiative and urged the World Campus and the dean of the School of IST to join it.

"It seemed like the least I could do," Camplese said. "Katrina just devastated students."

Mathews said that in recent years, he has seen many students affected by world events, such as the war in Afghanistan, and if they could go serve the country, he could teach this course. He has also supported the use of online courses to continue education in case of events that might cause a university to shut down, Mathews said.

Camplese said he would center his course on the context of Hurricane Katrina and how technology impacted disaster recovery.

Registration for the classes began Monday and ends Oct. 10.