Memberās Profile
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David Wyatt, WAOE Director and
Membership Officer
I must say, not being an online practitioner as such, that I sometimes
wonder what I'm doing in the thick of supporting an organisation dedicated
to the establishment and continuing improvement of online education as
a profession. Things can get a bit hairy at times (to use an Aussie
colloquialism), especially when my limited technical expertise gets violently
challenged by the occasional (?!) vagaries of browsers and other software.
But then I reflect that significant parts of my background in Australian
higher education teaching and management, and in running projects concerned
with flexible delivery and staff development in the vocational education
and training, have brought me into close contact with most of the issues
in the field WAOE seeks to serve. Commitments to access and equity
in education, to quality in teaching and learning practice and to lasting
value in outcomes for students are not - or should not be - confined to
specific professional areas.
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Appointed as a lecturer in English to a new teachers college in 1967 - early
in the burgeoning years of higher education in Australia, which ended all too
soon in the mid-1970s - I soon began contributing to the administrative side
of the institution, focusing in particular on academic advisement, recognition
of prior learning, development and accreditation of courses and liaison with
the relevant professions and the wider community. Over time, this work
led to leadership roles in these areas and I went on from there to senior management.
The so-called advanced education institutions (institutes of technology and
teachers colleges, mainly) I worked in until the late 1980s, when mergers and
other forms of rationalisation (read cost-cutting) collapsed them into what
is laughably called the "unified national system" (of universities), were at
the forefront of post-secondary education. They were innovative, not to
say adventurous and experimental, in their approaches to program content, design
and delivery, but at the same time strongly committed to the principle of accountability
for the quality and value of their work and its outcomes - to students,
prospective employers of the students, professional authorities, and the wider
community, as well as to governments, of course.
An especially challening, and rewarding, application of my professional interests
and concerns was - and still is - the management of effective access, teaching
and learning delivery and support programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders in such higher education fields as teacher education, nursing, management,
and liberal studies.
Leaving the university sector in mid-1994 to take up consulting and educational
project management as a career, I already had under my belt a project that created
a professional development package for workplace education practitioners and
another for adult literacy teachers. Both adopted flexible learning approaches,
but it was still early days in Australia for Web-based training, and the project
teams stopped short of using electronic communications. Even in the subsequent
development of a national plan for the flexible delivery of adult literacy and
numeracy and English as a second language programs, and another for the professional
development of practitioners in those fields, the funding agencies, professional
spokespersons and community representatives involved still showed some distrust
of information technology in general and online education in particular, which
somewhat limited the usefulness of these products. Nevertheless, I have
no doubt that everything I contribute to WAOE derives very largely from this
past experience in higher education and in vocational education projects.
My first practical engagement with the possibilities of online education came
in 1995 -1996, when I managed a project which made real headway on using the
Internet to conduct a self-paced, interactive teaching development program for
academic staff across the three universities in South Australia. Unfortunately,
the experience was too short-lived, as the project got funding for only six
productive months - too brief a period to realise all its potential. The
site set up by the "SATURN" project - the South Australian Three Universities
Resources Network - still exists at http://saturn.flinders.edu.au/,
if anyone wants to take a look at what we attempted, and how far we got.
Follow the Postgraduate Education and the Teaching and Learning links from the
home page.
Involvement with SATURN led directly to participation in several online conferences
and some f2f workshops exploring new approaches to education and training at
several levels and in different fields, using information technology and telecommunications.
And so eventually to the Teaching in the Community Colleges online conference
in 1998, which gave birth to WAOE. As an elected Director of the Association,
I have particular responsibility for managing the membership recruitment processes,
including the development of a database and network/communications system.
Needless to say, I undertake this role with major input and assistance from
other officers and members who possess far more technical knowhow than
I do, for all that I'm now probably on the fastest learning curve ever in my
whole professional life! Editing WEB is an important contribution, as
I see it, to the ongoing communication between the management of the Association
and its members.
I also try to stay in touch with longstanding interests in educational access
and quality by getting involved in relevant projects and other activities of
WAOE. An example is my participation - representing WAOE with responsibility
for managing international links and consultations - in the team which made
a recent application for a Learning Anywhere Anytime Program grant (in the USA)
to develop guidelines for delivering online education to people with visual
impairments. This was not successful in 1999, but reviewers' feedback
strongly encourages making another attempt next year.
Currently in my project management work, I am responsible for the evaluation
of a pilot program installing Internet-ready computers and providing skills
training in two Indigenous communities in rural South Australia. In less
than five very part-time months, this small-scale initiative has seen community
members leap from almost total unfamiliarity with telecommunications, let alone
the Internet, to confident surfing of links to similar communities across the
world, handling official business by email, settin up electronic banking, and
planning for creating Websites and for taking more specialised training in Web-based
research, electronic commerce and financial management. It is now hoped
that the outstanding success of the pilot will lead to a further, bigger grant
in 2000, which would extend installation and training to several more Indigenous
communities and support consultations and investigations aimed at creating an
implementation strategy for reaching all remaining communities over the subsequent
two or three years.
About Member's Profile
In each issue of WEB a different member introduces him- or herself and
talks about experiences and interests in online education and training. Drawing
on the information and URLs provided on their registration forms, the WEB Editor
is targetting individual members who are doing especially innovative and exciting
things in online education with requests to provide a brief profile.
But why wait to be asked? All WEB readers are urged to use the
Memberās Profile to help flesh out the person behind the impersonal email address
youāre known by in WAOE. We are a member's organisation - reMEMBER!! Just a
short piece will do. As well as giving us some background information, weād
like you to tell colleagues why you joined WAOE, what you hope to gain from
your involvement, and what you would like to contribute.