JEvents

The Primary Goals and Objectives of this web site and of this organization are to:

Provide an Orientation to and Overview of Concepts and Issues Educators and Distance Learning Technical People Need To Know Now

1. Facilitate the creation and deployment of free open educational materials and educational experiences to as many uneducated (illiterate) or under-educated poor and under privileged people in the world as well as to the not-as-poor but still under privileged people in the world.  If nothing better happens here on this site, show how that can be done.
2. Offer a viable valuable educational alternative choice for students and educators world-wide to the emerging commercial online education and eBook publishing industry. 
   By their actions to-date (documented on this site) this emerging industry has demonstrated that it wishes to dominate and profit greatly from online education and from providing the digital materials and online experiences that facilitate that education.
   The losers in this commercial plan, this currently highly attractive commercial investment opportunity, as they have been for decades and even centuries, are very likely to be the poorest of the poor and the not-as-poor but still under privileged students.  Those students are numerous and under-served not only in this county, the USA, but also in all other developed and developing countries in the world.  May this site make a difference that favors them and their educational needs
3. Provide some of the "example" and "live" student education available here as "just-in-time" learning as well as "personalized" learning that is "tailored" for the target students' education experience, preferred learning styles and immediate and longer term learning needs.
4. Discuss collaboratively on this site how "we" the interested users of this site can define or how our "colleagues" elsewhere have already defined "just-in-time" learning and "tailored instruction." Build up on this web site one or more lists of the "online use cases" which make "the most educational and practical-use sense" and which might be implemented as test case instruction or as an instructional pilot project, both to be the object of systematic study with test-students and "live" students from the target audience.
5. Educate Educators with the content on this web site in at least three languages: English, Spanish, and French.  English has to come first if only because that is my (JGW's) first language. The latter two languages are most used in developing and yet-to-develop countries world-wide as a people's second language, if they have not already learned some English.

Provide the Technical Orientation and Education Educators and Technicians are Going To Need in The Next 10-20 Years.  Add the Pedagogical (and Androgogical) Issues as They Emerge in This Field

1. Educate Educators about "distance learning" (DL) in general and about the uses of content management systems" (CMSes) for DL and "learning management systems" (LMSes) in particular.  Any "tips, tutorials and classes" created for that purpose and web-published here shall be presented in three levels of difficulty: (1) presented in "lay person's language" which a college student or graduate student can easily understand, (2) in light technical language which students and faculty with a little experience with computers are likely to be able to understand, and (3) in more technical language suitable for instructional technology managers and for the technicians who plan, purchase, setup and manage the CMSes and/or LMSes used or to-be-used by an organization engaging in distance learning as well as the computer server equipment (or Cloud computer services) these CMS or LMSes run on.
2. Educate Educators about trends in online tutoring as well as the proven best practices in online tutoring and distance learning. Show examples on this web site, i.e. have this web site be a "portal" to those best case example sites.
3. Educate Educators about "intelligent tutoring systems" (ITS, an ITS-enhanced CMS, an ITS-enhanced LMS).  ITSes eventually will be integrated with DL CMSes and/or LMSes. We who collaborate on this web site initially "blue sky" how that integration might happen and how it technically and pedagogically needs to happen.
   Levels of "information" and "instruction" about ITS will be: beginning, intermediate, and advanced hopefully within each of the previous named level of language-difficulty categories: "lay language," "light technical," and "heavy technical language."  General ITS topical categories will be: overviews and details for both non-technically adept and technically adept educators.
4. Education Educators, Institution Managers, and Technicians about "better" and "best" uses of existing free and commercial DL-CMSes, LMSes and ITSes that might be used with either of these delivery systems. The use of any of these configurations will have verifiable improved educational outcomes.  THose systems which "fall short," will be "rated" as such on this web site.
5. Education about DL CMS for Web Site Developers and Web Site Maintainers
6. Education about and Coordination of Web Software Development which results in enhancements to some free open source DL CMS Web Site Creation and educational content delivery software tools.

There are five (5) key objectives to achieve these goals:

1. Start small, keep initial online offerings "simple," plan and Build-out this site, its content, and its services to Scale-Up.
2. This site will provide educational information and examples which identify and promote the appropriate and more effective best uses of existing and emerging educational technologies.  The identified educational technologies, in the well-discussed opinion and investigations of the users of this web site, will deliver more efficient, effective as well as individualized educational web content and experiences as "distance learning" (DL) to the student users.  The educational content published here will help educators become better-informed adopters of these technologies and wiser selectors of the preferred educational methods and experiences the respective technologies create.  The educational content published here also will help educators to demand better technologies and quicker innovations to existing technologies from their free open source vendors as well as from their commercial web software vendors.  Hopefully their better informed knowledge of and more well reasoned opinions about the technologies and of the pedagogical (and andragogical) methods they enable will result in more rapid higher quality, and more effective educational technological innovations that truly, measureably help improve student learning.
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