About WAOE

The World Association for Online Education (WAOE) is a nonprofit public benefit corporation, incorporated in the State of California, USA. WAOE is organised for charitable purposes and not for the private gain of any person.

WAOE's Objectives

See the WAOE's Objectives and Associated Documents page of the WAOE Orientation Course.

The Meaning and Exercise of Membership in WAOE

WAOE is incorporated in the State of California as a non-profit and public benefit membersâ organisation.  The membership owns it.  We want all members to be active in the Association in all the ways and to the greatest extent that they wish to or can manage to be involved.

And because we are an incorporated professional organisation - as well as a globally spread association of professionals - there are various policies, rules and procedures that we are obliged to follow in order to maintain our official standing under Californian law.  Observance of these requirements is an all the more sensitive matter for us because we are engaged in the delicate process of securing recognition as a tax-exempt organisation for the purposes of receiving grants, sponsorships and donations.  Some of the most important expectations of and obligations on our members are summarised below.

No doubt, many members will not be especially interested in the details of the conduct of WAOE's affairs according to our legal obligations, and certainly our hope is that this bulletin and other WAOE elements and activies will always, ultimately, strike the balance of focus in favour of matters concerning the best professional practice of online education rather than somewhat dry questions of organisational policy and procedure.  However, WAOE is an organisation, a legal entity - and necessarily so in order to be able to fulfil its objectives.  In this still very early period in our establishment and growth, we are inevitably pre-occupied with such questions - which are not necessarily dry to every intellectual taste, of course, nor lacking in their own intrinsic interest.  Please bear with us and look to where we are headed, and not just at the sometimes painstaking and tedious little steps we have to take along the road!

Becoming a Member
If you're reading this article, you've already joined, of course.  This means you have filled out and submitted the registration form found through the Membership link on the home page of the WAOE Website.  And, from September 1999 onwards, it will also mean that you have paid the annual subscription fee of $US10 (we are asking for renewing members to pay the fee by September 1).

At this stage, there are only two categories of membership of WAOE: associate members and voting members.  For more information, have a look at Article 12 of the Bylaws for more information.  Also, our Incorporation FAQ page maintained by Treasurer, Jenna Seehafer, sets the rights and responsibilities of members within the context of Californian law.  (Jenna is responsible, with help from Parliamentarian Mike Warner on the organisation and conduct of meetings in particular, for liaison with Californian authorities and for ensuring we observe all legal requirements in our policies and procedures.)

Associate Membership
Registration and payment of the fee automatically makes you an associate member of WAOE.  This basically means you can do or read or join anything and everything that WAOE has to offer, except stand for office, nominate other eligible members for office, or vote in our constitutional forums or occasional ballots on issues of policy.  As an associate member, you will receive an email notice when the WAOE Electronic Bulletin (WEB) appears on its Web site every two to three weeks, along with a list of the contents of the current issue.  You'll have access to JOE, our refereed Journal of Online Education, and you'll be able to join any of the Committees or one or other or more of the Online Course and Resource Evaluation Workgroups (OCREWs) that are currently active.

In fact, as we become more established in our ways of operating we'll push our constitutional expectation that every associate member should belong to at least one OCREW or similar group as a minimum commitment to active participation in the Association's affairs.

All associate members are expected to subscribe to the announcement listserve, WAOE-News, as a matter of course.

Voting Membership
Voting members are those associate members who have formally identified themselves as people who wish to participate in the governance of the Association.  They would attend formal meetings of the Association, make nominations and cast votes in general elections for WAOE, and participate in the ballots through which key decisions affecting WAOE are taken.  Voting members are the "members" referred to in the WAOE Bylaws in compliance with the requirements of Californian incorporation law, which recognises voting members only, as we define them.   Thus, only voting members may be included in the quorum for formal meetings of WAOE such as the recent Annual General Meeting, and have their votes counted on motions proposed or in ballots conducted during such meetings or other official events.

An associate member may become a voting member by  the simple act of sending an email message to the Membership Officer (officially titled the Chair of the Membership Committee) - stating that he/she wishes to be recognised as a voting member.  Fo convenience, you could just copy/paste the following text into that message: "I wish to be recognised as a voting member of WAOE" (without the quotes).  No additional fee payment is required.

Conversion of membership becomes effective within 10 days after the request is received.  Under this rule, the eligibility of voting members to be included in the quorum count for any formal meeting or ballot is declared and announced 10 days prior to the notified starting time for that meeting or ballot.

Once conferred, voting-member status will continue for as long as each designated voting member wishes to retain that level of participation in WAOE.

Relinquishing Voting Membership
Voting members may revert to non-voting status (ie associate members) simply by writing a letter or email to WAOE's President or Executive Secretary explaining their intention to become less active in WAOE and their wish to end their membership or to convert it to an associate membership.

Annual Renewal of Membership
Both associate and voting members are required to renew their membership between July 1 and July 30 of each year, commencing in 1999. The conditions of and procedures for renewal are decided annually by the Directors on advice from the Planning and Finance Committee at its April meeting, and advised to members shortly afterwards.  Failing to renew membership, including payment of (or waiver from) any subscription fee, will be understood as resignation from WAOE membership (WAOE Bylaws, Article 12, Section 9).

WAOE's Communications and Discussion System

The principal legal, structural and organisational way in which our objectives are realised is through The Meaning and Exercise of Membership in WAOE.

Less formally, perhaps, but no less crucially in their own ways,  WAOE maintains a system of listserves and discussion groups as our means of establishing and maintaining communication between the management of the organisation and the membership and between members themselves and encouraging active participation in discussions, forums, projects and so on.  This system is described in the WAOE's Communications page of the Orientation Course.

WAOE Committees and OCREWs

When you filled in the membership registration form, you identified which of the various Committees and Online Course and Resource Evaluation Workgroups (OCREWs) you are interested in.  This article is concerned with providing members with more information about these major components of the structure and organisation of WAOE, but it will concentrate mainly on OCREWs.  The article is based to some extent on an item about OCREWs originally included in WEB Volume 1, Number 2 (March 28 1999).

Committees
The purposes of the various Committees and how these might work towards the fulfilment of WAOE's objectives is perhaps fairly readily understood from their titles and composition, as they appear on the membership registration form:

Membership Committee
Finance Committee (now the Planning and Finance Committee)
Dissemination Committee
Records Committee
Web Design Committee
Online Educator Development Committee
Affiliate Liaison Committee
Research & Publication Committee
Online Academic Conferences Committee
Online Parliamentary Procedures Committee

• The list of Committees derives from a constitution drafted before WAOE become incorporated and held its inaugural elections.  Now that we are learning from experience what kind of internal structure and organisation will best suit the Association's needs, some aspects of the putative committee system may well be adapted, coalesced or even abandoned.  We think it would be wise not to consolidate too soon a mode of operation that in the long run may not prove the best for us.
• To make WAOE's structure and organisation operationally effective requires the development of a quite sophisticated database of the names and addresses of the members who expressed interest in different Committees and OCREWs at the time of registration, and a system for generating mailing lists and searching connection among sub-group members and between different components WAOE that will facilitate communication, discussion, networking, conferencing, voting and all other activities required to make the Association work.  Database development has long been a major priority  for management action, but it has also been thwarted by inadequate resources and by a variety of practical difficulties in the way of coming up with the most appropriate combination of server facilities, database design, technology services, hardware and software compatibility among different operating systems and software.  However, it seems likely that significant headway will soon be made through the Board of Directors' Meeting.
• WAOE has barely got off the ground.  We have only just conducted our first Annual General Meeting and our second meeting of the Board of Directors, and our first global celebration of cultural differences was held just in February (the second of these members' events is proceeding now, as a follow-on from the AGM).  Partly because of the sheer organisational challenge of making these things happen according both to constitutional requirements and as smoothly as we can, the energies of the Board of Directors and the Coordinating Ring have been highly focused in those directions. It will be time to turn our full attention to other more specific aspects of WAOE's operations when we begin to distinguish the forest from the trees!
   

Online Course and Resource Evaluation Workgroups (OCREWs)
According to the Archive of Founding Documents, OCREWs could be described, at least in intention, as the heart and soul of the Association.  (Extending the metaphor, Committees might be thought of as the bones and sinews.)  OCREWs provide the main locations and focal points for members to contribute in practical ways to the enhancement of online education as a professional discipline.  And that's WAOE's core business.

In conception, OCREWs comprise groups of members interested in particular aspects of online education and training who meet and work together online - sharing ideas and information, discussing issues, making representations to relevant agencies and other forums, pooling resources, and so on.  And in doing all this, such groups will make the strongest possible and most useful contribution to realising the central purpose of WAOE.  This is because the contribution will be coming from professionals across the complex and rapidly developing field of online education and training who are directly testing and extending the possibilities of the field as they confront the problems posed by their online students and clients, experiment with workable solutions to them, and share what they learn with colleagues around the world.

Although OCREWs are given a defined place in WAOEâs structure and organisation, and a list of them appears on the memberâs registration form, there are no set ways by which their role can be carried out.  The groups are being set up which are not listed on the registration form (though they may cover some of the territory) - the Education Standards OCREW, and the Educational Software and Courseware OCREW, the Industry and Academia OCREW - and an invitation by Mihkel Pilv for members to join a "learning by teaching OCREW initiative" stands on the home page of the  WAOE Website.

You could use the lists of the Directors and the members of the Coordinating Ring to find out more about a particular structural group or an initiative which interests you - better still, to make contact with a view to joining an OCREW or other body - or perhaps to suss out how members who have started groups went about it and what agenda and processes they are establishing.  Vice-President Mihkel Pilv carries particular responsiblity for encouraging and supporting OCREWs and other action groups.  He will be glad to answer any queries you may have.

Members of the Coordinating Ring, WAOE's elected management executive, are looking at ways of revising the registration form to better reflect the flexibility that actually exists in the formation and operation of these vital groups.  As a result, the current request to check an OCREW box will be replaced by a more open-ended invitation to identify interest in various aspects of online education and training, perhaps using a checklist with scope for members to add their own topics.

Although we plan to improve the information-gathering mechanism, notional commitments to particular OCREWs already suggested through the registration process already provide a useful basis for clustering members into potential participants for WAOE officers and others starting up new groups to contact in exploratory ways.  In a still broader approach, personal contact with members could be used, as time permits, to tease out more specific information about what they are interested in, as well as what they hope to gain from joining WAOE, and how they would like the organisation to run.

To an extent, the same organisational priorities and difficulties that have slowed implementation of the committee system have inhibited the formation of OCREWs, particularly the delays in setting up electronic communications among members linked to a comprehensive and relational database.  However, OCREWs by their nature and intent are not so constrained, in structural and organisational terms, as designated Committees.  The W in the acronym stands for Workgroup, after all, and there is great flexibility in the number and kind of OCREWs that could be set up, as the presently active groups amply illustrate.  In fact, working groups of members that get established need not necessarily be called OCREWs at all.  They might be project teams, for example, or action research groups, or discussion forums with specialised agenda like Web access for people with disabilities.

The most important point to make about the specific action and discussion groups that come into operation - whatever they may be called - is that, like everything else in WAOE, they both belong to and depend on the membership. The field of online education and training is wide open for effecting vital changes and improvements, and WAOE needs the active participation and thoughtful contributions of its members in order to carry out its part in this vital work.

All that is required to get an OCREW or other group started is for a member to devise and promote a specific purpose for having a group and then to enlist at least three other members to join him or her in the enterprise.  That's exactly how both the Education Standards and Industry and Academia OCREWs began.  WAOE-Views or the Your Say section of WEB could be used to canvass interest and recruit like-minded colleagues.  The next step is to announce the formation of the group to the Vice-President, , who will give all the advice and assistance he can.

So, itâs over to you.  The agenda is yours.  Its your Association.  Go to it!

 

WAOE's Objectives | The Meaning and Exercise of Membership in WAOE | WAOE's Communications and Discussion System | WAOE Committees and OCREWs | Top

End of WEB Vol 1, No 12, September 20 1999.