Volunteer assignment:

Course reviewer

Objective:

PEOI needs courses in all professional fields that can help students to get hired or start their own business. The purpose of a review is to alert the author(s) about accuracy of the content, scope of the writing, appropriateness for the profession, missing concepts, related readings, references and new findings.

Type of course content:

PEOI courses are intended to include all materials that can be helpful to acquire competency in a particular subject. The major and essential component is naturally the text of the course which should be comparable in depth and breadth to what can be found in leading textbooks in the discipline. Several other components should be present to help students with different learning styles to be exposed to a variety of learning experiences. The most important of such auxiliary materials is a data bank of test questions. A clear distinction exists between test questions which are used in automated tests for which students receive grades, and review questions which allow students to verify quickly if they remember of what they just read. There can also be files with assignments, cases, lab work, readings, comments and marginal material in appendixes. Some courses may also require glossaries, or lists of formulas, graphs, pictures, videos, sound files and tables.

Each reviewer is not expected to handle all the writing (but he/she can if so desired). Instead, a reviewer is invited to join a team working on a subject. If no team exists for a particular subject, the first reviewer by starting on a new course becomes the reviewers team leader for the subject. New volunteers are welcome to join in and contribute to review comments. Comments and corrections can also be directed to PEOI.

Background and experience required for reviewers:

Because of the variety of course content to be developed, volunteers with a variety of backgrounds are welcome to participate in the effort. For most subjects a doctorate degree and some teaching experience is expected from the team leader and main reviewer. For newly emerging fields this requirement may not be realistic. For the auxiliary materials, graduate assistants are invited since their practice in reviewing questions can be helpful for them in achieving a deeper understanding of the materials and prepare them for developing teaching tools themselves.

Content Management System:

The work of a course reviewer is entirely web based with the help of procedures in the "Authoprs" section. The Authors section also has a description of the structure of a course with its different types of files. There are two types of course structures: introductory and advanced. All courses have one of the two file structures so that procedures such as testing can function effectively for every course.

Registration of all volunteers:

To use PEOI's procedures, a reviewer must be registered as reviewer with the registration procedure in the "Volunteers" section. Then, the "Edit HTML text", "Edit cases" or "Edit questions" procedures give access to all course material in all languages. Note that a reviewer must sign in each time in order to access procedures.

Method of writing and uploading review comments:

The "Edit HTML text" procedure handles the text of all chapters, assignments, review questions, comments, readings and appendixes. The "comments" section is intended to contain notes, corrections, third party observations and questions. This is the file in which review comments should be entered. The file is accessible to all volunteers working on the course, such as the author(s) of the course.

In the "Edit HTML text" procedure, after writing the review comments in the TEXTAREA, the button "Save" is clicked to save the text in a temporary directory. When a file is saved, a message goes out to the one who saved the file, the team leader for this course and to PEOI. The file is always first saved in a temporary directory, and is not available for students or the general public to see. The "Notify that work is completed" button is used to notify that the file can be move to a location where it will be seen by students.

When in the "Edit HTML text" procedure for the first time, please read the explanations at the bottom of the screen, and note, for instance, that when pasting text into the TEXTAREA, only materials taken from a file formatted as ".txt with line breaks" should be inserted. Materials copied from most other formats contain hidden formatting overhead that is unnecessary and can prevent the file from being saved properly.

Bring your skills to bear:

Please bring your skills to help millions of disadvantaged students all over the world, who do not have access to traditional education because of where they live, time constraints or insufficient income. Thank you for your interest.

All tasks can be carried out from home on your own computer and at your own time. Volunteers can join in forum discussions of issues of common interest. Registration is necessary to participate in a forum.

For more details, please write a short message indicating the volunteer opportunity you are interested in, attach a recent resume, and email to appropriate person in contact information.