Careful research into the very activities in which you are engaged can be a powerful tool for learning personally and communally. In the coming fall each team will be undertaking a general course assessment together with specific action research. The principal focus of these activities will help refine and validate the criteria we are using as a learning community. As part of the leadership development, Distance Education Fellows and their teammates have been exposed to the variance within the System of institutional missions, academic culture and resource allocations. Sensitized beyond their own campus, these Fellows bring a broader understanding of the needs and challenges we have as a system as we develop our institutional capacities for distance education.
Communities emerge from a common purpose and the time required to build relationships.
From my experience, I have been confident that this group would in time jell as a learning community, merging their individual learning goals with a shared agenda. This has accelerated during this spring. Finally as the project director I envisioned the group would become empowered as individuals and as a community. This May marks the milestone when the Distance Education Fellows have formed a Distance Education Fellows Steering Committee with an Executive Committee to seek additional funding to fuel their emerging agenda of action and research and to collaborate with me on designing future WIT projects. We hope you will visit this site again as we will have more to share as we continue our inquiry.