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World Association for
Online Education
The Mentor Project
The Mentor Project was instituted in 2004 as a means to connect WAOE members and their expertise with educational institutions or non-profit organizations needing assistance in developing online learning opportunities. WAOE members volunteer their services through online communication, training, and individual discussions as part of this project. Occasionally, these project beginnings may become opportunities to develop major online learning communities for needy countries.
The Mentoring efforts quickly became a project of primary interest and member services. Archival pages are available for the early project efforts. In 2004 mentors took advising roles on seven key projects, including:
- An online course for language arts
- A virtual think-tank for Africa
- A disease case study presentation to help transform a course in clinical laboratory science
- Development of paramedical study centers in rural areas of India
- A course to teach instructional design skills to teachers in Mexico
- Critical assessment of a course on civil rights and social justice
- Identification of both systems-level and online course level software that are open source or very inexpensive to assist economically disadvantaged countries and/or institutions in creating online education systems.
Chaired by Nicholas Bowskill, the project continues to be one of the most valued services today. Work in 2006 includes mentoring Mongolia as they set up a Open University, and work in the Middle East to construct a learning community for educational development.
For full information on this project and the struggles and triumphs of the mentoring groups over the past several years, visit Nicholas Bowskill's project webpage for details.
To join one of the mentoring projects, contact Nicholas Bowskill directly. He will add you to the Mentoring List-serve and assign you tasks in an ongoing project depending on your expertise and interests.
