Directors Reports

President's Report

This report will focus on the Special Board of Directors' Meeting that is actually in progress at the moment, considering issues that will be deliberated upon at this meeting (AMM2003) and at the Annual Board of Directors' Meeting that starts in the WAOE WebBoard on July 11, 2003. For details on WAOE's new ability to provide for member-member networking, please see the Candidate Statement for WAOE President and especially the Committee Report for Site Redesign & Member Networking.

Members interested in the progress of the organization may like to view the Website of previous Annual Members' Meeting in mid-2002 or mid-2001. Members may also view many Board meetings and special events including previous AMM discussions at the WAOE WebBoard, logging in with the part of your e-mail address (with which you joined WAOE) before the @, and with waoe as the password. For assistance e-mail Mike Warner. The most comprehensive repository of discussions about online education and the WAOE organization is at the waoe-views list archives, 1998 to April 2003 and from April 2003 to the present.

The June 2003 Special Board of Directors' Meeting proceedings are also available at the WebBoard, but summarized here for your convenience. After the Roll Call to establish a quorum, the minutes of the previous Board meeting of July 2002 were accepted. A motion has passed to establish a Chief Technology Officer as a sixth WAOE Director, but the amendment to the Bylaws needs to be passed at this AMM2003 by a quorum of WAOE Voting Members.

Coordinating Ring officers appointed since the last Board meeting were ratified: Maggie McVay Lynch of Portland State University in Oregon, which has become WAOE's ISP as an international public service, has been appointed as the WAOE Networking Information Officer. Begum Ibrahim, Mara University of Technology, Malaysia, is now the WAOE Publicity Coordinator among other committee roles and the Malay Chapter. Sholom Gold in New York City has reassumed the Chair of the Online Educator Development Committee, which is working on a WAOE Online Teacher Certification Course. The following people are on the Membership Committee, including linguistic or cultural Chapters: Boris Sedunov, Moscow State Institute of Business Administration (Russian); John Senyo
C. Afele, International Program for Africa, Ottawa; Bunyamin Atici, University of Firat, Turkey (Turkish); Ashok Banerji, Monisha Electronic Education Trust, Calcutta; and Luigi Macri, Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, Calabria (Italian). Diane Howard, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Texas, has been appointed to the Online Educator Development Committee. Steve Eskow in California, a former college president, is on the Research and Publications Committee, and is writing a column for WAOE's revived newsletter WEB (WAOE Electronic Bulletin). It is my pleasure and privilege to welcome them again.

Another agenda item is Officer, Committee, and Member Obligations. WAOE is free, but when officers and members do not give a little of their time in return, it tends to take extra time from the active WAOE volunteers. These are mostly moral obligations that go with member privileges, but there are a minimum of necessary obligations to give the organization meaning, such as members being able to contact each other via e-mail for networking. Related to this is the agenda item on
Appropriate Use of Member Information, which aims to safeguard membership data so that it is used according to WAOE objectives.

Some agenda items are for discussion of expanding services to members: New Member Contact to welcome members more personally when they join electronically, and to provide more orientation to participate in WAOE activities. Highlighting Member Contributions means to give recognition to WAOE members when they publish new papers and so forth. The Membership Committee and WAOE Electronic Bulletin (WEB) newsletter staff can coordinate these services if members also cooperate in letting officers know about the publications and other achievements of themselves and other WAOE members.

Another item added to the agenda shortly before the Board meeting was Donation to Estonia, which I tried to explain as follows: "Miksike in Estonia originally took the initiative to register WAOE's domain name. To own its domain, WAOE had requested it earlier and in early 2003 offered US$500 to reimburse Miksike's expenses and time, such as to transfer the domain name. Miksike instead offered to release the domain name as WAOE moved to Portland State University, and suggested without linking the two issues that WAOE could contribute $1,200 needed by an NGO connected to Miksike. In principle WAOE would like to express
gratitude by reciprocating the favor. So it may be a matter of deciding how much WAOE can afford that would have a positive impact." Treasurer Mike Holmwood just reported that WAOE has a balance of about US$3,500. At the Annual Board Meeting in July 2003 the Directors will try to decide on a suitable contribution to the NGO for Russian speaking minorities in Baltic countries.

As for discussion items at this AMM2003, Maggie McVay Lynch suggested including about three "strategic goals for the next year [to seek member] commitments for participation. Some standout examples of goals already in progress would be the Online Educator Development Committee (OEDC) teacher education courses and multilingual/multicultural development. Though the OEDC courses seem off to a great start for higher-ed, I suspect that some assistance in the K-12 area would be good. In terms of the multilingual/multicultural part it would be nice to get some people committed to developing Websites instead of simply acting as an email language contact. Even if the sites are only one or two pages that explain, in their own language, what the purpose and commitment is of WAOE and how to navigate the main site. One other strategic goal that Steve has championed is the development of a Code of Ethics for Distance Education or Online Education. This could certainly use some structured participation."

Luigi Macri suggested that "It should be very important to: a) develop linguistic/cultural chapters (as we are doing); b) revive the concept of Online Course and Resource Evaluation Workgroups (O-CREWs); and c) start a special interest group for foreign language teaching online; we could call it: FLTO-WG - Foreign Language Teaching Online - WAOE Group" [or FLT O-CREW?]. An Italian language discussion group is forming. Although there have been new WAOE Websites in Turkish and Italian recently, with proposals for Southeast Asia in English, Chinese and Russian, certainly more are desired to fulfill WAOE's goals. The active participation of WAOE members in such discussions at the AMM and projects from then on is most desired. Thank you very much.

Steve McCarty
Kagawa, Japan
WAOE President

Vice-President's Report

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Executive Secretary's Report

Executive Secretary's Report for WAOE's 2002-2003 Annual Members' Meeting

Although I am one of the founding members of WAOE and had served as WAOE's Treasurer, this was my first year of a two year term as elected Executive Secretary of WAOE. I accepted this position, knowing that I had much to learn to carry out all of the duties required by our Bylaws. Just as former Executive Secretaries had discovered, I found the number of tasks assigned the Executive Secretary too specialized and demanding to complete within the time I had available to volunteer. And I struggled to keep up, eventually asking for help in maintaining WAOE's online presence this year. From first hand experience, I'm convinced that this position is too difficult for volunteers to manage as it is defined in WAOE's Bylaws. Therefore, I have proposed changes to WAOE's Bylaws to split the Executive Secretary's position into duties more manageable for volunteers and to add a computer specialist, a Chief Technology Officer, to the Board of Directors. Voting members will be affirming these changes (or not) when they vote during this meeting.

According to our Bylaws, the Executive Secretary is not only a Secretary charged with maintaining the paper copies of WAOE's documents, monitoring online committee and project meetings, maintaining archives of annual and special meetings as WAOE's minutes, notifying members of meetings, answering inquiries about policy and WAOE, and participating in Board meetings, but also the one responsible for managing email listserves, updating and maintaining WAOE's website, keeping meeting archives, providing websites for the annual meetings of members and of the Board of directors, administering WAOE's server account, developing forms and scripts, and developing an online database. Since I knew that I had little time available for these activities and since I was just learning how to do some of these tasks myself, Sam Eneman and Steve McCarty agreed to manage the listserves for me. I did put up the website for the WAOE 2001-2002 annual meetings, and Alan Rea, the former Executive Secretary, provided the forms and scripts for roll call and balloting (since I was running for office and could not be involved in this part). You can view the site of the 2002 annual meeting and the transcripts of the 2002-2003 Board of Directors' meetings.

For most of this past fiscal year, 2002-2003, WAOE has had a server account with Interland, and I have tried to maintain that account as well as to provide services to individual officers who had direct access to certain directories so that they could complete their work. But there were many problems in administrating the server account. While it seems as though it should have been a straight-forward regular maintenance activity, the number of separate logins, the fact that I didn't have a clear administrative login myself for nearly five months because of idiosyncrasies of Interland's administrative hierarchy, and the fact that WAOE did not own its own domain name made it difficult to replace logins for officers who needed them. Also, I did not have software that was capable of managing server accounts until last January.

This last year, WAOE's server account reached the maximum space we could use online, especially for listserves and email addresses, without moving to a larger, more expensive server account. Rather than increasing our server space, we were fortunate in being offered space on the server at Portland State University in Oregon, USA by Maggie McVay Lynch, a WAOE Ring officer who also agreed to set up email lists, redesign and modernize WAOE's website, and create forms to update our records. Because WAOE did need to own its domain directly for Portland State University to host WAOE, Miksike agreed to transfer ownership of WAOE's domain to WAOE. And WAOE's main site is now hosted by Portland State University servers.

WAOE is a nonprofit public benefit member's corporation organized for educational and charitable purposes under California's jurisdiction. It is the dedication of volunteers, the elected officers, members of the Coordinating Ring, and the founding members who have kept WAOE a reality. Now we have the specialized computer support WAOE has needed to fulfill its mission to become a fully functional professional organization for educators who use or wish to use computer-mediated learning. I am grateful for everyone's assistance in keeping WAOE online this year. But to keep it online next year, I intend to recommend that Maggie McVay Lynch serve as our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), assuming the Bylaw changes are accepted by members.

Please remember to vote.

Jenna Seehafer
Executive Secretary of WAOE
Director on WAOE's Board of Directors
Agent for Incorporation
Member of WAOE's Coordinating Ring

Links to Minutes and Transcripts:

Minutes and transcript for ABM2002
Transcript of the Special Board Meeting, June 2003

Treasurer's Report

Membership Director's Report

Dear WAOE Members,

Agenda for the 2003 Annual Members' as we discuss during June'03 Special Directors' Meeting is "Member-to-Member Networking" model of WAOE, expressing gratitude to Maggie for her hard work and dedication in making this possible.

Please accept my apologies for the late report. It is a very hard time for me .because so many things are happening at once in Academia. This year issue of Membership is "Member-to-Member Networking" -which was proposed earlier in a small thread by an Indian educator Dr. Ashok Banerji , of Monisha Electronic Education Trust, Calcutta and later on Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch, of Portland State University has masterminded the issue of Member-to-Member Networking in a significant way.

Better later than never, as a Membership Chair it is an exquisite hono(u)r to announce the "Member-to-Member Networking" model, which was thoroughly
worked by Maggie.

Members Only Website, entered by clicking at WAOE's home page: Associate and Voting Members have received passwords to benefit from this site in a message from Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch that I think was entitled "member networking." When members fill out the Web form, as everyone should (once), then information from the form appears at the Members Only site.

(Important: How the seed of Networking Model is planted)
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 17:08:11 GMT
From: Dr Ashok Banerji <a.banerji@epssworld.com>
Reply-To: Views@list.waoe.org
To: Views@list.waoe.org

I like Lillian's suggestion. Indeed WAOE is the ideal for networking amongst members and for that matter it is vital that we get to know one another. I think it would be good idea to create a database of members that anyone can access. Additionally a brief biography of the members, in small batches, may be circulated periodically.

The power of online collaboration is fantastic. I give you an example. About 10 years back while working for my PhD thesis in UK I used to contact and exchange ideas with other researchers. Many of those contacts still continues even though we have never met each other and we move through continents on professional activity. Now back in India I am collaborating with my e-pal from Virginia Tech to write a course for an online university. The mode is solely through telecommuting and e-collaboration. The WAOE being a community of people with similar interests, can surely be a fertile forum for collaborative activities like joint authorship, exchange of ideas, and so on. Let us kick start the process with a brain storming activity about what sort of collaborating activities we can initiate in the New Year (If that is ok with the norms of this forum, otherwise please excuse me.).

I have joined the forum recently and I would like to keep my eyes open to meet new friends in the coming year. Wishing you a very happy New Year.
Ashok
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Ashok Banerji PhD, MIEEE
Consultant: Multimedia, Educational Technology and EPSS
Director, Monisha Electronic Education Trust (MEET)
Content Expert, Jones International University
A-125 Survey Park, Santoshpur, Calcutta 700075, India
Tel: (91)-33-2416-6707
a.banerji@ieee.org www.epssworld.com/monisha

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Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve
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Later, Maggie worked on the above proposed issue to establish Member-to-Member Networking model, through which fellow WAOE members can closely collaborate over time with other members. The issue of Member Networking should also help us to cope-up with overwhelming information in a virtual organization.

The World Association for Online Education (WAOE) is an educators organization dedicated to turning online education into a professional discipline. WAOE is a non-profit organization of the membership type and solely staffed by volunteers. Thanks to David Wyatt, our out going Director, who did marvellous and at the same marathon job of handling membership. Since June 2002 when Director for World Association for Online Education, David Wyatt and outgoing Chair of the Membership Committee relinquished the service of WAOE as the Director, I am elected as a Membership Chair to serve on the five Directors. Since June 2002, I have taken the responsibilities to help the Membership Committee, but later Maggie has added her invaluable services towards WAOE and its Member-to-Member model.

We are clearly fulfilling our charter as the WORLD Association for Online Education! The membership growth figures are very encouraging, given that WAOE has still a way to go in establishing the full set of services to members envisaged in the initial formative period.

Member Networking model

WAOE's members are its greatest resource. Access information about members, their background, interests, current projects, research, and email addresses through the members-only button in the top right corner of your screen at the main WAOE site. Few colleagues: if you are looking for a grant partner or multiple partners the member networking site will help you to identify good candidates. The networking site also provides an opportunity for members to share articles, book-chapters, or books on which they are currently working. Find writing partners or simply share the work of members who are tops in the field of online education. For more details, Please contact Dr. Maggie McVay-Lynch.

Committee Members:
Austrailia:David Wyatt, Educational Consultant, Adelaide, Australia

Africa: John Senyo C. Afele, International Program for Africa, Ottawa

China/Southeast Asia: Colin Ong, HRD Consultant, Singapore

India: Ashok Banerji, Monisha Electronic Education Trust, Calcutta

Italy: Luigi Macri, Ufficio Scolastico Regionale

Russia: Boris Sedunov, Moscow State Institute of Business Administration

Turkey: Bunyamin Atici, University of Firat, Turkey

For enquiries about administrative committees, contact the President, Steve McCarty, in Japan.

See the President report for AMM 2003.

More details about the WAOE project details, members can navigate the WAOE Organizational Page based in Japan.

Thank you very much for support.

Arun Kumar Tripathi
WAOE Membership Chair

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