PEOI Board of Directors March 7, 2007

Dear board members,

Apology for the delay in sending this board meeting agenda.
A few more fixes were necessary in My discussion procedure
for board members to be able to use it. Hopefully, the
procedure has been fully debugged, but if you come across
anything that does not look right, please notify me right
away. Thanks.

 

-------------- YOU MUST BE REGISTERED AT PEOI ----------------

Starting this year, board meetings will be more interactive, and
hopefully more stimulating and productive for all.
March board meeting will be conducted in My discussion on PEOI.
To participate in the discussion you must be registered and logged in.
Please verify that you have no problem logging in (if you do have a
problem, contact me right away).

In addition, for those interested, we can conduct an optional
conference call using skype (suggested by new board member
Krishna Seeburn). The conference call will not however replace
the written entries because not everyone will have skype, and
because a written transcript must be preserved for future
reference. My address at skype is john.petroff@skype.com.

 

------------ PROCEDURE FOR MY DISCUSSION ENTRY -------------------

Please log in at PEOI in About us as board member. Then click on "My
discussion" (in upper right part of the screen). Once in the procedure,
the screen will contain this agenda, messages of other board
members, one area to enter your comments and votes, one area to
post a general entry, and guidelines on how to use the procedure.
Use the entry that contains an invitation to type in comments on the
four discussion items of this agenda, and to enter your votes for
the thirteen items on which to vote. Once your reply is completed,
click on "Save" button. This will record your answers and your votes,
and will send out messages containing your comments to all board members.

In case you do not want the messages to be emailed to all board
members, place a checkmark in front of all the persons to whom
you do not want the message to be sent. If you want to change
something in your answers, you can always do that by visiting
My discussion again anytime you want: your initial comments and
voting will open automatically as long as you do that prior to
the deadline. Make changes and click on "Save". This were suppressing
messages to board members can be especially useful if you are
merely making a small spelling correction for instance. Note that
there are two lists of board members in which messages can be
suppressed: each pertain to the message just above it.

If you want to respond to comments made by someone else, you have
two options. One is to modify your initial comments and send
them out again. And the second alternative is to write a new entry
using the yellow area specifying in the title of the entry to whom
and on which item you are writing new comments.

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The agenda items for March 2007 online board meeting are
presented below.

Item #1- approval of the minutes of November 2007 meeting.
See https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/minutes/minutes06-07.html

Item #2- outstanding open education course author award:

PEOI must take the lead in promoting open education: not just its
own offering, but online open courses everywhere on the internet.
There are two important reasons for that. First because this is
part of PEOI's mission. And second because announcing awards can
be a potent promotion for PEOI, especially to university professors
among whom deserving candidates for the award will be selected.
Hopefully, funding of about $50,000 can be arranged.
Suggestions on whether and how to set up the award are invited.
This award is separate from the Volunteer recognition award which
PEOI will continue to conduct annually.

Comments are invited on feasibility and usefulness of such award.

Item #3- criteria for completeness of online open education course:

Criteria for the award can be inspired from PEOI's course design
described in "Authors" on PEOI. Please read that section, and indicate
if and how such criteria are adequate. Comments do not have to center
on award criteria alone, and can touch upon how to expand learning
alternatives in online courses in general. It is indeed appropriate
to review periodically PEOI's overall course design to make sure that
it is realistic, and in line with what other open education present
on the Internet.

As a background you may want to compare PEOI's course design to some
of competing web sites which are mentioned and briefly described in
PEOI's 2005 Annual Report (see link in "About us"). Reading PEOI's
2005 Annual Report should convince you that PEOI seeks
to place itself at the forefront of open education quality. This should
be most apparent if PEOI's courses are compared to the recently made
available open education courses at Open University (UK), that merely
contain a few pages of information on a subject representing a few
weeks of study, contain nothing in terms of knowledge assessment, and
do not qualify for credit transfer.

Naturally, setting strigent requirements on PEOI's courses (such for
instance, in having review and test questions) keeps the number of
PEOI's completed courses down. However, shortcuts can only be
damaging to course quality and PEOI's image.

Comments are invited on what should be standards for high quality
open education courses.

Item #4- committee for outstanding course author award:

A committee to select and recommend deserving authors for the award
needs to be created, and its mandate must be formulated. Board members
from academia are especially urged to join this committee. This committee
is separate from the Volunteer Recognition Committee which deals
exclusively with PEOI's volunteers, whereas the outstanding open education
award will be open to all, and is likely to be awarded mostly to
outsiders in order not to give the impression that it is self-serving.

Comments are invited on what should be the role of such committee.

Item #5- potential authors/courses and internet search team:

PEOI has already recruited a significant number of Internet search
and course review volunteers. These will assist in searching for
deserving work. Two procedures already exist on PEOI, "Potential authors"
and "Potential courses", to list and evaluate outside course work.
Please visit the procedures and see if the type of information gathered
is adequate. (Note that the procedures were not specifically created for
the award, but for selection of open education content that deserves to
be placed on PEOI and translated by PEOI's translators.) Naturally,
the design of these procedures should be influenced by the standards
for open education discussed in item #3 above.

Comments are invited on what information gathering is necessary for
evaluating open education.

Item #6- appointment of new board members:

Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 1 appointment of Abbie McClure as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvmcclureabbie.txt
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 2 appointment of Anupam Palit as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvpalitanypam.doc
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 3 appointment of Sharon Cleary as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvclearysharon.doc
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 4 appointment of Sandeep Jangra as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvjangrasandeep.doc
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 5 appointment of Maxime Émond-Richard as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvemondrichardmaxime.doc
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 6 appointment of Luke Bocock as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvbocockluke.rtf
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 7 appointment of Joseph Varghese as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvvarghesejoseph.doc
and major contribution in designing PEOI's Statistical Calculator (see
Forum discussion #32
Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 8 appointment of Olaf Noetzold as board member
see https://www.peoi.org/About/Abouten/board/cv/cvnoetzoldolaf.pdf

Please refrain from voting yes for more than half of the above applicants.

 

Item #7- removal of board members:

Resolution proposal 2007-03 # 9 accepting Atup Philipp's resignation as board member
Resolution proposal 2007-03 #10 removal for absences of Nazim Syed as board member
Resolution proposal 2007-03 #11 removal for absences of Peter Wells as board member
Resolution proposal 2007-03 #12 removal for absences of Adele Wong as board member

Item #9- next online board meeting:
July 2007

Starting with this board meeting, vote bulletins will no longer be
distributed. Voting and comments must be entered in My discussion procedure
on PEOI, which can be reached only if you are registered and logged in.
Exceptionally, a vote bulletin will be supplied for this board meeting
if any board member has difficulties using My discussion procedure.

Thank you all very much for your participation in the discussions,
for your vote and for your continued support of PEOI.

John Petroff
Chairman of the board

In order to facilitate discussion among 26 board members, here is the list of
email addresses in this distribution:

Board member list as of March 1 2007
1- Kenneth Barden <kenneth_barden@yahoo.com>
2- Rinku Bhattacharya <RinkuB@aol.com>
3- Mihai D Caramihai <m.caramihai@ieee.org>
4- sean chen <chxysean@yahoo.com>
5- edna eufemio <edna3dime@yahoo.com>
6- Frank Geerling <frankmgeerling@hotmail.com>
7- Johannes M. Glas <jmglas@hotmail.com>
8- Cauvery Sachdeva Handa <kaveri_princess@hotmail.com>
9- Jeanne M. Henry <jmhc_co@att.net>
10- Thirumagal Kanagasabai <thirumagal.kanagasabai@utoronto.ca>
11- Carol Law <carol.law@rogers.com>
12- Kimberly Louis <kimberlylouis@gmail.com>
13- Poi Kee (Frederick) Low <fred@starhub.net.sg>
14- Lynley Mackay <lyn-praid-crc@bigpond.com>
15- Shahid Ali Panhwer <shahidalipanhwer@yahoo.com>
16- Michael Palmer <mp043@hotmail.com>
17- John Petroff <petroff@pronetisp.net>
18- Allison Raymond <aliraymond@aol.com>
19- Simon Rosin <simonism@simonism.com>
20- Krishna Seeburn <kris_seeburn@intnet.mu>
21- Romina Sengara <romina_sengara@hotmail.com>
22- Nazim Syed <nazimsyed786@hotpop.com>
23- Minh Vo <mhvo2001@yahoo.com>
24- Peter Wells <p.wells@cepes.ro>
25- Patsy Wilcher <patsywilcher@yahoo.com>
26- Adele Wong <vekulai@hotmail.com>