The coordinator is the heart and soul of a team (but not necessarily the muscle).
The major role of the coordinator is to keep the group productive. This requires to maintain its membership by, for instance, recruiting new members, making new members feel welcome and part of the group, checking that the new member is indeed a desirable addition and guiding the members into tasks that are best suited for them. A secondary role is to keep track of the progress made by the members in their work, but this task can be delegated to a team member. The coordinator can make his/her role as big as he/she wishes in expanding the course offering and improving student learning on PEOI.
Maintaining membership in the team:
First of all, the coordinator must maintain the team and seek
to expand it. New volunteers are recruited from a number of services
such as Online Volunteering and volunteermatch.org. Listings have
been placed on these and several other web sites. But the listings
expire every 90 days on Online Volunteering and every 180 days on
volunteermatch.org, and these listings need to be posted again when they
have expired. In
addition, new listing may need to be placed as the tasks in the
team change. To make sure that the coordinator is notified of
the expiration of the listings and of new expressions of interest
form volunteers, the coordinator must be the administrator of
the listing on these web sites.
Welcoming new volunteers :
Expressions of interest for new volunteers will be emailed to
the coordinator once he/she is the administrator of the listings.
A welcome message should be sent to each new volunteer, along
with some guidance on the registration procedure and the type
of work best suited for the volunteer's background. It is crucial
that the new volunteer be told to join the team, otherwise his/her
name will not appear in the team's roster and the coordinator
will not know that a volunteer has registered. Once the volunteer
has registered and completed the email address verification step,
the coordinator should clear the new volunteer's registration.
Clearing, modifying and removing volunteer's registration:
Clearing a volunteer's registration is done in "My registration"
part of "My account" of the coordinator. The coordinator
can open the registration form of every member of the team by
selecting the volunteer's name in the bottom menu and clicking
on either "faculty" or "staff" as the case
may be. Clearing the volunteer's registration requires putting
"0" (i.e. zero) in the "deficiencies" box,
your name or initials in "verifiedby", and the date
in "dateverified" (in the form 2005-04-26), and clicking
on Save in the "Modifying deficiencies, contact and evaluation"
box. Explanations for clearing volunteer's registration appear
at the bottom of the "My registration" page. Naturally,
the coordinator must clear the registration of volunteers only
if the registration appears legitimate and worthwhile. If the volunteer
does not seem to belong to the group notify John Petroff. The coordinator
can make changes in the registration form of the volunteer (for
instance, if the language of work or the qualification have not
been properly set), and can remove the registration of the volunteer
altogether (by cliking on "Remove"; which causes the
registration to be archived.)
Assigning tasks:
After reviewing a new volunteer's registration form and CV (if
one has been supplied), it will be possible to suggest appropriate
tasks to the volunteer. At the same time, guidance should be provided
on where to find explanation of how to complete the task (e.g.
in Volunteers needed, explanations in the "Authors"
section and each respective procedure). The tasks can be assigned
by the coordinator (see the explanations in "Select my tasks"),
or the volunteer can choose them him/herself in "Select
my tasks".
Verifying and finalizing team member work:
For most tasks, the coordinator receives short email messages
reporting on the progress made by team members in their tasks.
One such email will be a "Notification" that work is
completed on a given page. The coordinator may choose to assign
the editing to a team member, or finalize the task by moving the
page to its permanent folder. Moving a page to its permanent folder
is performed in the same procedure as where the work was (i.e.
"Edit text", "Edit questions", "Edit cases",
"Edit pages" or "Edit procedures").
In the procedure, the coordinator should choose the name of the
team member in the bottom menu so as to perform work on that team member's behalf.
Then, open the page of the work (by changing language, course, chapter
and/or section as needed). Finally, after verifying that the page
is in good order, click on the button "Move to permanent
folder". This step will
Creating new projects and setting up new tasks:
As work is completed on some projects, new projects will come
on line (such as creating a new course or translating a newly
completed course). Some may be initiated by the coordinator him/herself.
Creating or modifying a project and its tasks is performed with
the "Set up projects" procedure which is found in the
"Projects" section. There are
now 23 standardized project types and 35 standardized tasks. Setting
up a project should consist of using the automated process of
giving a name to a project, specifying the course for which is
intended, selecting from the standardized project types, and when
the project is created, using the automated process of inserting
tasks in the project. If need be, new project types can be set
up with the "Edit project names" (accessible directly from the Set
up project procedure). Likewise, new tasks can be created with
the "Edit task names" procedure (also accessible from the "Set up
project" procedure).
Team strategy:
With the exception of clearing a new volunteer's registration,
all activities of the coordinator can be delegated to team members,
this includes the process of setting up new projects and moving
pages to permanent folders. But the coordinator should continue
to be in charge of the overall strategy for the team, and that
includes recruiting new members, proposing new projects, improving
the appearance of the pages (such as the welcome pages of sections),
seeking parnterships, attracting students,
suggesting new courses, soliciting new authors. The strategy should
be developed in conjunction with PEOI's administration, board
of directors and other team coordinators.
For comments and suggestions, please email to John Petroff listed in contact information.