Having served WAOE for six years from an outer island of Japan, I recently moved to a better but much more demanding professorship in the very large city of Osaka. Regretfully I have not been able to give as much attention to the WAOE organization and corresponding with individual colleagues around the world. However, the first semester is nearly over, so I am looking forward to working more closely with WAOE colleagues again.
Fortunately other WAOE officers have come through as they always have to sustain the organization. Besides the candidates for each elected office, Katherine Watson has agreed to be WAOE's new NPO representative to the State of California, a conduit for WAOE to the non-virtual world. Many thanks to Portland State University for providing our membership infrastructure, and to all the volunteers who have maintained the avenues of our virtual community.
For this Annual Members' Meeting the main venue is the Views discussion list,
which of course can go all year round. The votes
of Voting members, simply by clicking a few times with their Web browsers, are
also needed and greatly appreciated. As a
main event, the Mentoring initiative led by Nick Bowskill at the University
of Sheffield will be unveiled in public after having
developed through a pilot phase involving mostly WAOE officers.
This meeting is also the time of year to discuss the organization by making
suggestions and networking more actively, so colleagues worldwide will be glad
to read what you are thinking!
Thank you.
Collegially,
Steve McCarty
Professor, Osaka Jogakuin College
World Association for Online Education: http://waoe.org/president/
E-mail: waoe@waoe.org
Still to come
After years of piecing together resources to stay online, WAOE now has the specialized computer support 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 and especially for our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Maggie McVay Lynch's impressive efforts to improve WAOE's image and finances by hosting a professional, functional website for WAOE from servers at Portland State University (Oregon, USA). WAOE has proven that educators can work together and assist each other despite differences in culture, language, beliefs, priorities, and physical location. As a founding member, I'm proud of the progress WAOE has made as a worldwide professional organization, and I hope WAOE continues to serve educators and represent them in every way possible in the years to come.
According to our Bylaws as amended last year, the Executive Secretary is charged with maintaining the paper copies of WAOE's documents, completing annual forms and documents required as a corporation, monitoring online committee and project meetings, maintaining archives of annual and special meetings as WAOE's minutes, answering inquiries about policy and WAOE, participating in Board meetings,and assisting our Chief Technology Officer as needed with WAOE's website and annual meetings. Unfortunately, my university duties and family's needs leave me too little time to continue as an effective Executive Secretary in the coming year and my term of office is over. I therefore request that those who supported me as Treasurer and then as Executive Secretary vote for Professor Mary Dereshiwsky who is running for Executive Secretary in our current election. WAOE needs the energy, skills, and ideas of new board members, and Mary is well qualified for this position.
Though I will no longer be Executive Secretary, I will continue to serve as WAOE's representative for matters concerning WAOE's California nonprofit corporate status until I'm able to formally transfer those duties to one of our WAOE Ring members whose primary address is in California after the Annual Board of Director's meeting in July 2004. I suggest that the next Executive Secretary and agent for service of process work closely together to assure the corporation's good standing.
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
Dear WAOE colleagues,
First of all, as a Membership Chair let me allow a word of thanks to Maggie for the hard work. Her technological expertise is a great help to the infrastructure of WAOE.
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.
Agenda for the 2004 Annual Members' Meetings:
We need to discuss about the re-structuring the responsibilities of Membership
Chair’s position in light of the addition of the sixth Director of Information
Technology position. A listing of Membership Chair’s responsibilities
can be found
in the Bylaws in Article 4 Section 10. It should be noted that the duties,
as listed in Article 4 Section 10, for the Membership Chair will be discussed
for revision in light of the added sixth Director of Information Technology
at last year's AMM.
See the last year AMM .
During June'03 Special Directors' Meeting we discussed the "Member-to-Member Networking" model of WAOE by expressing gratitude to Maggie for her hard work and dedication in making this possible.
See details of the June’03 Special Director’s Meeting on Web-Board .
The foundation of Member-to-Member Networking Model is that the WAOE is an educational NPO, the ideal for networking amongst members and for that purpose 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 WAOE being a community of people with similar interests, can surely be a fertile forum for collaborative activities like joint authorship, exchange of ideas in the research field.
Last year, 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 organisation. The World Association for Online Education (WAOE) is an educators organisation dedicated to turning online education into a professional discipline. WAOE is a non-profit organisation of the membership type and solely staffed by volunteers. 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. 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.
This year we have seen two new innovative events. During March and April 2004,
WAOE educators participated in a Book Review of the Morten Flate Paulsen's book
"Online Education and Learning Management Systems - Global e-learning in
a Scandinavian perspective". This review was conducted on the Web-Board
by international participants. The Book Review is available under the specific
folder of "Online Education: Review" on the Web-Board.
A review of the book was also published in Educational Technology & Society, Volume 7, Issue 2, 2004.
Another event, which was very fruitful to the WAOE educators, students and teachers is the Mentoring Initiative. This was launched by Nicholas Bowskill. The mentoring initiative was begun as a suggestion from the July 2003 Annual Meeting. WAOE members are offering the use of their considerable background and experience to mentor other members who are new to the world of online education. The Online Educator Mentoring Committee, chaired by Nicholas Bowskill, has solicited member proposals for mentoring non-profit online education projects.
Other useful references to the last year Reports and Web-sites:
See the President
report for AMM 2003.
More details about the WAOE project details, members can navigate the WAOE Organizational Page based in Japan maintained by our President, Professor Steve McCarty.
See the last year Membership Director's Report.
Thanks very much.
Kind regards,
Arun Kumar Tripathi
Membership Chair for WAOE
Director on WAOE's Board of Directors
I have enjoyed the challenges and rewards of serving as the Chief Technology Officer for WAOE this past year. Together, we have accomplished a great deal, but we still have a ways to go to make our site and our presence as technologically efficient, interesting, and user friendly as possible. I see the primary focus of this position as providing the technical and communication services needed to keep a vibrant, active virtual community within WAOE.
Most of my time last year was spent building the WAOE site as you see it currently, keeping up with requested changes, including a presence for every new member, and ensuring special WAOE events and meetings had the technology needed to be effective. The bulk of my daily web work throughout the year is in adding new members to the database, assigning secure user names and passwords, building membership and country pages for each person in the "members-only" section of the site, and troubleshooting members access issues. With an average addition of 20 new members each month this is a time consuming task, which I hope to partially share a little more with the newly elected membership chair.
Other responsibilities of this positon include adding, deleting, and maintaining all of the list-serves we use in WAOE. We create list-serves for various meetings, projects, and groups. Anyone in WAOE who desires a list-serve in order to keep in contact with a special committee or subgroup may request one. We currently maintain 31 different lists for WAOE, including 9 different language lists and 14 special projects lists. I also regularly update information and links about these lists and projects on the WAOE site under the "Organization" and "Communication" sections.
In addition to keeping the primary website active along with the list-serves, I have also focused on enhancing community and international communication for the organization. In this regard, I reinstituted the WAOE Electronic Bulletin (W.E.B.)--the newsletter which keeps everyone both inside and outside the organization informed of our activities. With contributions from members and officers on a regular basis we have been able to let the world know of the wonderful work our members undertake. This has also served as an excellent forum for members to learn about conferences and the ongoing work of WAOE to publicize our organization as members present papers and meet each other around the globe.
Finally, I've tried to keep up with technology changes in the field of online education by sharing books, papers, conference materials, and new product information I receive. With the help of other WAOE members, we have been able to make a small dent in the plethora of offerings our burgeoning field puts out every day. Additionally, as Portland State University (PSU) hosts the WAOE site it also means WAOE is able to take advantage of any university-wide technologies we may trial or implement. A good example of this was the addition of a webconferencing system, Horizon Live, in late January. WAOE was able to trial this technology along with PSU, by using it for an ad hoc Board meeting and later as a shared instructional setting for studentsand teachers in such varied locations as Japan, Brazil, England, and the U.S. I hope we can find many opportunities to increase our membership and online educator community by using technologies such as these.
Maggie McVay Lynch
Chief Technology Officer for WAOE
Director on WAOE's Board of Directors