The addition of this regular feature to the columns of WEB was partly prompted by Rick Reynolds' contributions to the Annual General Meeting in late June, which were focused on ways to build community among the members of WAOE. Thanks, Rick!
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The addition of this regular feature to the columns of WEB was partly prompted by Rick Reynolds' contributions to the Annual General Meeting in late June, which were focused on ways to build community among the members of WAOE. Thanks, Rick! |
On behalf of all the existing members, the Board of Directors and the members of the Coordinating Ring (WAOE's management executive) extend a very warm welcome to new members who have registered to join the Association in the past few weeks. We look forward to your becoming active participants in WAOE discussions and other activities.
As with any unfamiliar organisation, there must be a lot of questions in the minds of recent joiners. The firs place new members should go to for answers, of course is the WAOE Orientation Course. As well, mostly through links to the Orientation Course, this section of WEB will try to anticipate and answer one or two of the questions new members might be pondering by providing some fundamental information in each issue.
It's been quite a while since we said some of these things to our established members, so we're providing links to this basic information under the WAOE Policies and Procedures column. Of course, as with everything in WAOE, the full engagement of members themselves is the vital key to the interest and usefulness of these various columns in the bulletin. So if you have any question at all about the Association, send it to the Web Editor so we can respond to it here.
Thanks to generous support from long-standing member John Spiers and his LearnOnline organisation, and to the hard conceptualising and drafting work of Treasurer, Jenna Seehafer, WAOE has now established an Orientation Course which will provide essential information on a continual basis about the organisation and how it operates. Your membership subscription automatically entitles you to access this Course. In fact, as explained in the advice re Membership Renewal, online enrolment in the Course is the means by which membership of WAOE may be renewed for the 1999/2000 year, or new registrations may be effected.
One of the important benefits of this development is that it will free WEB to concentrate more of its content on helping the communication and community-bulding among members, and on raising major issues of concern to online educators and to the objectives and running of WAOE itself.
Please note that the Web pages for the Orientation Course are still under construction. Jenna and other WAOE Officers will add sections and items - including several parts of WEB as it now looks - as time permits and opportunity presents. You can go to the pages in progress either through Orientation Course, or through the View Course link on the WAOE Orientation Course enrolment page.
See the WAOE's Objectives and Associated Documents page of the WAOE Orientation Course
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.
The following elected officers are the five designated Directors of WAOE. They make up the Board of Directors which is accountable to the membership and to the Californian authorities for the proper governance and good management of the Association:
President (through June 2001): Steve McCarty, Kagawa Junior College, Japan
Vice-President (through June 2000): Mihkel Pilv, Educational Consultant, Estonia
Treasurer (through June 2001):
Jenna Seehafer, California State University,
Sacramento
Jenna is also, ex officio, the Chair of the Planning and Finance Committee,
and she convenes the Education Standards OCREW
Membership Chair (through June 2000): David Wyatt, Educational Consultant, Australia
Executive Secretary (through June 2000): Brian Donohue-Lynch, Quinebaug Valley Community-Technical College, Connecticut
Who is on WAOE's Coordinating Ring?
The Coordinating Ring is the Association's management executive group. It is a collective made up of the five elected Directors and several key appointed Officers and Chairs of Committees, and Representatives (eg the Conveners) of the Online Course and Resource Evaluation Groups (OCREWs) which are active, where these are persons other than a Director or an Appointed Officer:
"Cyber-Parliamentarian," and Online Parliamentary Procedures Committee Chair: Michael (Mike) Warner, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona
Publicity Coordinator, Public Information Committee
Officer: Mary Ellen Nourse, University
of Idaho
Mary Ellen also manages the WAOE-News listserve and coordinates our efforts
to secure major grants and sponsorships.
Multilingual Coordinator on the Public Information Committee: Arun-Kumar Tripathi, statistics scholar presently in Germany
Editor of the WWW Journal of Online Education (JOE) : Julia Keefer, New York University
Research and Publications Committee Chair: Katherine Watson, Coastline Community College, California
Affiliate Liaison Committee Chair: Terry Calhoun, University of Michigan; Internet Editor: Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
Educational Software and Courseware OCREW Representative: Robert Luke, Courseware Specialist: Office of the Vice President-Academic, University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada)
Online Academic Conference Committee Chair: Nicholas (Nick) Bowskill, Computer Based Collaborative Group Work Project & Centre for the Study of Networked Learning (CSNL), University of Sheffield, England
Online Educator Development Committee Chair: Kinshuk, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand; Primary Contact: International Forum of Educational Technology and Society (IFETS)
Education Standards OCREW Representative: Jenna Seehafer, California State University; Treasurer and Incorporation Liaison Officer: WAOE
Online Educator Development Committee Officer: Roberto Mueller, Universidade Federal de Vicosa, Brazil
Industry and Academia OCREW Representative: Kate Hand, CGI Corporation, Toronto