Volunteer assignment:

Online contacts builder and recruiter

 

 

PEOI can only exist and grow if it keeps on recruiting course authors. The role of online contact builders and recruiters is of prime importance.

The role of the recruiter is to locate potential authors as they are described below. Create a list of prospects by field and qualification. Then write an introduction email message. If a response is received, a follow up must build a relationship with PEOI leading to registration on PEOI and contribution to program and/or course development on a voluntary basis.

By authors, we mean a wide variety of writers, peer reviewers, editors, translators and many other creators of educational material. All PEOI's courses are developed by teams of writers and developers. The central person(s) is(are) naturally the author(s) of the text of the course. Authors can join a course development team, or propose a new course. Note that, because PEOI's courses are open to the public, no proprietary text will be published on PEOI unless the author is granting a license to publish (see Creative Commons and Educational Material Universal Common License at the bottom of every page of course text), or some other permission is secured in writing. Generally, PEOI's text must be the original writing of the author, and be comparable to a textbook (i.e. lecture notes and lists of key ideas are not acceptable).

As the design of PEOI's courses suggests, the text of chapters represents usually less than half of the material. To allow a variety of learning styles, all courses must also include cases, assignments, references, links, reading lists, exercises, review questions and test questions. In many cases, there are images, graphs, statistics and audio files must be created and uploaded to PEOI's server. The production of a course on PEOI can easily take far more than a thousand of hours of work. Aside from those developing courses, people capable of writing programs of study, supervise course offering in a discipline (whom we call deans) and volunteer managers that supervise completion of tasks, can also be included in the term authors. Thus, the skills set of authors that need to be recruited may vary considerably. Although, as stated already, the author of the text is the central person, and it can be presumed that all persons contact have the potential to be main authors even if eventually they are involve in less central material.

Most of potential authors are likely to be in the academic field, but not all. Some may be currently teaching, but professionals with years of experience can transfer even more up-to-date and relevant skills to PEOI's students. Publishing or participating in a textbook can be a major step in anyone's professional development. But publishing free open educational material (as that on PEOI) is not now recognized an equivalent to textbook publishing. Consequently, the authors that PEOI must seek to recruit, are probably those who have an interest in open education. Most university professors with normal teaching loads are unlikely to be good prospects if they are not offered monetary incentives, and PEOI has no money to offer. All authors must be volunteers.

Therefore, some of the places where potential recruits are likely to be present are all web sites with listings of members involved in discussion about or production of open education. One such web site is Development Gateway which has 40,000 members, some of who have already developed open education content. Another web site is Moodle which is a course management system for open education with thousands of participants. There are a large number of universities that have published open content, especially if their projects were funded by foundations such as the Hewlett Foundation. The reason why people who have been involved in some form of open content publication, may want to join PEOI is because of PEOI's resources and support to produce complete online courses.

The fields in which PEOI is wants to offer courses are all subjects that can lead to hiring in a profession. This excludes material in arts, literature, religion, sports, leisure and other self improvement aspects. Currently most new course development is taking place in the following fields:
- accounting
- economics
- finance
- information technology
- management
- marketing
- medicine
- pharmacy
- science and engineering
PEOI lists 89 disciplines in which course should be available eventually.

 

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 carry out all tasks and to participate in a forum.

For more details, please write a short message indicating the project you are interested in supervising, attach a recent resume demonstrating your ability to carry out the task, and email to John Petroff listed in contact information.